[MD] What is SOM?

[david buchanan]

Marsha said to Dave:
This is absolutely beautiful!!!

dmb says:
Yes, it is beautiful and I know why. Because its so full of quotes. Its 92% Pirsig and he's an excellent writer.

But I'll take credit for stringing them together like a good student.

And thanks!
> 
> 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.
>>
>>
> 
> .
> .
> 
> Shoot for the moon.  Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.........
> .
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