[MD] The tetra lemma

[david buchanan]

Ron said:
Lets back up and start fresh, First let me point you to what Paul Turner wrote about the tetralemma http://robertpirsig.org/Tetralemma.htm

dmb says:
Thanks. I hadn't looked at that in at least a couple years. I asked Paul Turner to explain it back then and was totally perplexed. At one point he gave up and so I never did figure out what was going on. I'm not sure if it was you or Paul who said, "traditionally logic is predicated on truth in 'be-ing'". I have no idea what that means. What is "truth in be-ing" and how is logic predicated on it? Paul says, "the positive tetralemma would be used to express the reality of subjects, objects, and so on and their strictly static existence whilst acknowledging their lack of individual essence entailed by their dependence on Dynamic Quality" . Here again, the point seem to be in defeating an idea that I just can't wrap my heard around. I remember asking Paul repeatedly, what the heck is an essence? In both cases, when I go on a web search to investigate "truth in being" or "essences" I mostly find a lot of theology and other kinds of God talk. I keep getting the feeling that this tetralemma is meant to defeat an entirely fake problem. I mean, it seems to be aimed at a problem that I find completely meaningless.

I've asked anybody who might plausibly know, teachers, fellow students, MOQers. What do you mean by "essence"? So far none of the answers have made a lick of sense to me. Even the simple word "being" has me baffled. If it means "existence", then we are talking about a category that literal includes everything that is. That strikes me a useless category. In that sense, "being" means nothing in particular and everything in general. I think Pirsig says something like, "a thing that cannot be distinguished from anything else has no value and does not exist." When we add these things together and start talking about the essence of being, I just roll my eyes and wonder how this nonsense ever got started. This has been going on for years now, so don't feel like you've failed to explain it properly. Clearly, its my problem.   

Ron said:
The way Paul describes the function sounds very much like being aware of the abstract/concrete distinction in language. In other words the negative tetralemma prevents one from making intellections based on concrete predication. Which is what keeps screwin with the MoQ. people tend to conceptualize DQ/SQ and Quality in terms of concrete entities.

dmb says:
What is an intellection? What is a concrete predication? And why do we want to prevent people from making intellections based on concrete predicatons? And how does that relate to the abstract/concrete distinction? I get the general idea that DQ is not a thing, that Quality is not a solid, liquid or a gas, but the idea seems to be much fancier than that. 



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