[MD] Letter to Bodvar Skutvik From Robert M Pirsig, September 15, 2000

[Ron Kulp]

Letter to Bodvar Skutvik 

>From Robert M Pirsig, September 15, 2000 

 

"The question of "How do you justify the statement that Quality equals
reality?" was the best one. The correct answer from a MOQ perspective
is, "by the harmony it produces", but this answer is only for people who
already understand the MOQ. Those who don't can't see the harmony and
for them this answer is meaningless. 

"We see that these people want rational justification, usually
"objective" justification "

 

"As you know there is something about quality that makes it impossible
for many to understand what you are talking about. A lot of it is
persistence of the materialistic, objective, historic tradition that
hopefully will be overcome in time. But also we are seeing a kind of
quality blindness that musicians call a "tin ear" of singers who keep
sharping and flattening notes without knowing they are doing it. Many
people just do not "see" quality at the same time they are obviously
seeing it, in the same way that tin- eared people do not "hear" harmony
at the same time they are obviously hearing it. I think this was what
you were trying to tell Hellier at the end of the Great Shoot-Out when
you told him to learn more about reality. It seems that all he could see
was quality as a concept, something with about the same scientific
reality as hippogriffs and Jesus in Heaven and other empirically
unverifiable entities. He just did not directly see what you were
talking about. Anthony McWatt attended a class on ZMM where the teacher
actually had the same problem. She had no grasp of what value was, only
what a value judgement was." 

Letter to Paul Turner

"Another subtler confusion exists between the word, "intellect," that
can mean thought about anything and the word, "intellectual," where
abstract thought itself is of primary importance. Thus, though it may be
assumed that the Egyptians who preceded the Greeks had intellect, it can
be doubted that theirs was an intellectual culture. 

When getting into a definition of the intellectual level much clarity
can be gained by recognizing a parallel with the lower levels. Just as
every biological pattern is also inorganic, but not all inorganic
patterns are biological; and just as every social level is also
biological, although not all biological patterns are social; so every
intellectual pattern is social although not all social patterns are
intellectual."

 


Ron: 

10 years later, the same misinterpretations exist. Perpetuated by the
same person. 

After all this time with no substantive answers and nothing new to
introduce and 

no progress made in their assumptions one would think that it was time
to

revisit the problem with an eye toward what was initially missed.