[MD] What is SOM?

[Heather Perella]

Yes.  Beautiful.  Beautiful.  Beautiful.


SA


--- On Fri, 8/22/08, david buchanan <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:

> From: david buchanan <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [MD] What is SOM?
> To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
> Date: Friday, August 22, 2008, 7:36 AM
> 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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