[MD] What is SOM?

[MarshaV]

Dave,

This is absolutely beautiful!!!

Marsha



At 02:36 PM 8/22/2008, you wrote:

>dmb said to Bo:
>It seems to me that you must be suffering from a 
>very odd definition of "metaphysics" and 
>"intellect". You seem to think the MOQ is 
>reality itself rather than words about reality 
>and so you are altering the MOQ so that it is 
>construed as essentialism rather than 
>philosophical mysticism, which is a vigorous form of anti-essentialism.
>
>Bo replied:
>Yes if that is essentialism I'm very much so, 
>but because DQ is part and parcel of the MOQ I 
>wonder how you avoid being a Quality 
>essentialist too ...  without resorting to the 
>Quality//DQ/SQ variety that even Pirsig finally had to abandon.
>
>dmb says:
>Pirsig's Quality is opposed to Plato's Quality 
>precisely because it is not an essence. We can 
>find this anti-essentialist move in what I take 
>to be the philosophical and dramatic climaxes of ZAMM....
>
>But why? Phædrus wondered. Why destroy areté? 
>And no sooner had he asked the question than the 
>answer came to him. Plato hadn't tried to 
>destroy areté. He had encapsulated it; made a 
>permanent, fixed Idea out of it; had converted 
>it to a rigid, immobile Immortal Truth. He made 
>areté the Good, the highest form, the highest 
>Idea of all. It was subordinate only to Truth 
>itself, in a synthesis of all that had gone before.
>
>That was why the Quality that Phædrus had 
>arrived at in the classroom had seemed so close 
>to Plato's Good. Plato's Good was taken from the 
>rhetoricians. Phædrus searched, but could find 
>no previous cosmologists who had talked about 
>the Good. That was from the Sophists. The 
>difference was that Plato's Good was a fixed and 
>eternal and unmoving Idea, whereas for the 
>rhetoricians it was not an Idea at all. The Good 
>was not a form of reality. It was reality 
>itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way.
>
>.....................
>
>
>What is good, Phædrus, and what is not 
>good...need we ask anyone to tell us these things?
>
>It is what he was saying months before in the 
>classroom in Montana, a message Plato and every 
>dialectician since him had missed, since they 
>all sought to define the Good in its 
>intellectual relation to things. But what he 
>sees now is how far he has come from that. He is 
>doing the same bad things himself. His original 
>goal was to keep Quality undefined, but in the 
>process of battling against the dialecticians he 
>has made statements, and each statement has been 
>a brick in a wall of definition he himself has 
>been building around Quality. Any attempt to 
>develop an organized reason around an undefined 
>quality defeats its own purpose. The 
>organization of the reason itself defeats the 
>quality. Everything he has been doing has been a fool's mission to begin with.
>
>On the third day he turns a corner at an 
>intersection of unknown streets and his vision 
>blanks out. When it returns he is lying on the 
>sidewalk, people moving around him as if he were 
>not there. He gets up wearily and mercilessly 
>drives his thoughts to remember the way back to 
>the apartment. They are slowing down. Slowing 
>down. This is about the time he and Chris try to 
>find the sellers of bunk beds for the children 
>to sleep in. After that he does not leave the apartment.
>
>He stares at the wall in a cross-legged position 
>upon a quilted blanket on the floor of a bedless 
>bedroom. All bridges have been burned. There is 
>no way back. And now there is no way forward either.
>
>For three days and three nights, Phædrus stares 
>at the wall of the bedroom, his thoughts moving 
>neither forward nor backward, staying only at 
>the instant. His wife asks if he is sick, and he 
>does not answer. His wife becomes angry, but 
>Phædrus listens without responding. He is aware 
>of what she says but is no longer able to feel 
>any urgency about it. Not only are his thoughts 
>slowing down, but his desires too. And they slow 
>and slow, as if gaining an imponderable mass. So 
>heavy, so tired, but no sleep comes. He feels 
>like a giant, a million miles tall. He feels 
>himself extending into the universe with no limit.
>
>He begins to discard things, encumbrances that 
>he has carried with him all his life. He tells 
>his wife to leave with the children, to consider 
>themselves separated. Fear of loathsomeness and 
>shame disappear when his urine flows not 
>deliberately but naturally on the floor of the 
>room. Fear of pain, the pain of the martyrs is 
>overcome when cigarettes burn not deliberately 
>but naturally down into his fingers until they 
>are extinguished by blisters formed by their own 
>heat. His wife sees his injured hands and the 
>urine on the floor and calls for help.
>
>But before help comes, slowly, imperceptibly at 
>first, the entire consciousness of Phædrus 
>begins to come apart -- to dissolve and fade 
>away. Then gradually he no longer wonders what 
>will happen next. He knows what will happen 
>next, and tears flow for his family and for 
>himself and for this world. A fragment comes and 
>lingers from an old Christian hymn, "You've got 
>to cross that lonesome valley." It carries him 
>forward. "You've got to cross it by yourself." 
>It seems a Western hymn that belongs out in Montana.
>
>"No one else can cross it for you," it says. It 
>seems to suggest something beyond. "You've got to cross it by yourself."
>
>He crosses a lonesome valley, out of the mythos, 
>and emerges as if from a dream, seeing that his 
>whole consciousness, the mythos, has been a 
>dream and no one's dream but his own, a dream he 
>must now sustain of his own efforts. Then even 
>"he" disappears and only the dream of himself remains with himself in it.
>
>And the Quality, the areté he has fought so hard 
>for, has sacrificed for, has never betrayed, but 
>in all that time has never once understood, now 
>makes itself clear to him and his soul is at rest.
>
>dmb continues:
>We see this same paradox in LILA, where Pirsig 
>says that philosophical mystics have 
>historically shared, "a common belief that the 
>fundamental nature of reality is outside of 
>language; that language splits things up into 
>parts while the true nature of reality is 
>undivided". He says, "Historically mystics have 
>claimed that for a true understanding of reality 
>metaphysics is too 'scientific'. Metaphysics is 
>not reality. Metaphysics is NAMES about 
>reality." He says, "The central reality of 
>mysticism, the reality that Phaedrus 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. Quality is a 
>direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions".
>
>Let me put it this way, old friend. Dynamic 
>Quality itself is reality but the MOQ is not 
>reality. It is names about reality, a set of 
>intellectual static patterns that describe 
>reality with definitions and concepts. Like its 
>rival, the MOQ is a product of that analytic 
>knife. In other words, the deconstructive 
>anti-essentialist moves against SOM have to be 
>applied to the MOQ too. Its categories and 
>concepts are not to be confused with the primary 
>empirical reality from which they are derived 
>any more than SOM's categories and concepts. I 
>mean, Pirsig is consistently anti-essentialist 
>even with respect to his own metaphysical 
>system. Otherwise, the MOQ would be exempted 
>from the art gallery analogy and the whole thing 
>would otherwise be full of holes.
>
>I think this is what gives rise to your SOLAQI. 
>You're trying to solve problems that don't 
>really exist in the MOQ. The problems are a 
>product of your essentialist misinterpretation 
>of the MOQ. Get rid of the essentialism and the problems will evaporate.
>
>

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Shoot for the moon.  Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.........
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