[MD] Consciousness a la Ham

[david buchanan]

Ham said to dmb:
Why is the MoQ vigorously anti-essentialist?  Maybe you can explain that to me. ..If essence is the ultimate reality that philosophers since Plato have searched for, by what postmodern hubris is its rejection praised?  Is not Quality the very essence of reality for MoQists?  How can you say that a  philosophy based on Quality is anti-essentialist?

dmb says:
Bo asked the same question recently. After reading my description of essentialism he said, "Yes if that is essentialism I'm very much so" and he also said, "but because DQ is part and parcel of the MOQ I wonder how you avoid being a Quality essentialist too". Here's how I answered the question... (It's mostly Pirsig quotes.)

dmb said the other day:
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.

Ham said:
...I would submit that Essence has at least as much empirical relevance as Quality does, plus a metaphysical foundation that the MoQ lacks.

dmb says:
This is a good example of what I mean when I say the MOQ is not compatible with your thing. You've aired this complaint many, many times. The MOQ does lack a metaphysical foundation. That's pretty much what it means to be an anti-essentialist, a particular way of being an anti-essentialist. In that sense, it is not a lack at all. From a MOQer's perspective getting rid of foundationalism is like getting rid of poison. The MOQ is the antidote of choice. In this analogy, what you offer is poison. 

I would also point out that Quality is not based on the evidence of experience. It is experience itself. Thus the alternative name for DQ is the primary empirical reality.

I could be insincere, but at least I'm right.


 


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