[MD] The SOM/MOQ discrepancy

[Andre Broersen]

Hi All,

We seem to have a few closely related threads going but I'll stick with this
one.

The quintessential basis of the MoQ is Quality which Pirsig equates with
Reality. This Reality can only be experienced pre-intellectually. It cannot
be known.It is the moment at which no subjects or objects are
experienced...only Quality/Reality/One.
Phaedrus' Korean experience told him immediately that to create a
metaphysics out of this one single experience/realisation and to make it
acceptable to Western ears was virtually impossible. The 26 letters of the
alphabet can describe Reality? The Koreans nodded their heads and said 'No'.

Even the statement 'Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment
puts upon us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit
of it' is probably too much already for a large majority of 'Western' ears.
The huge problem is that 'we' 'Westerners' want to intellectualise about
everything. This is the process of changing DQ into SQ!
Firstly we want to make sense of it, then understand it and then create
meaning out of it (these are 3 different levels of 'absorbing' the
experience, if you like). This, of necessity, involves the use of language.
Our 'intellect' must use a representational system called language which
goes through a process of discrimination on the 'handful of sand, the world
of which we are conscious.(ZMM p75). Pirsig calls this process: 'the knife'
but the problem I would suggest is that, not only is the 'process' a 'knife'
but also, the very use of our language is a knife.To wit: our language
cannot 'contain' / 'represent' Reality.

Thus we have 2 difficulties: 1: the process...our reasoning/ discriminating
what is of value and what is not (S/O logic to create 'meaning' subservient
to 'truth' (SOM) and 2 our language...'we are suspended in language'.

How to create a 'path' through which 'East' can meet 'West' and 'West' can
meet 'East'?

Our traditional notion of 'intellect', by which I mean that 'part' supported
by our brains (a huge, dynamic bundle of 'emergent property' ) is where this
discrimination process is taking place and this is S/O 'driven': reason and
rationality...truth-seeking, the groundwork laid down logically by
Aristotle, defines this process leading to SOM...a world of subjects and
objects, cause-and-effect relationships etc. In this sense (Bodvar) the
manipulation of symbols at the 4th level is not merely a 'definition of
language' . It is a manipulation of data leading to a conceptualisation of
reality.(maybe I have not quite understood your meaning)

But now comes Pirsig!

With the introduction of Quality he up-ends the whole SOM framework incuding
intellect!. Not truth but Quality i.e.the Good, is Reality and 'truth' is
subordinate to Good.'Intellect'( I still have difficulty with this word) and
prefer to call it Intellectual level (i.e.intellectual patterns of value and
I still have difficulties with the word 'level'...anyway...) Pirsig has, not
only injected objects and subjects with a dynamic reality, he has done the
same with the intellectual level. By introducing the Quality concept, All
has become PATTERNS ...nothing fixed...but interweaving, interplaying,
interfering etc etc.Stable, to be sure, but all responsive to Reality. He
has, linguistically, redefined (SOM) platypi and through this process forced
us to alter our 'reasoning' and the concommittant arrival at 'meaning' ..at
making sense of reality and our 'part'/experience in it.

As Pirsig says (ZMMp 381): 'The One (of which the MoQ is a representation)
can only be described allegorically, through the use of analogy, of figures
of imagination and speech'.
One cannot escape language.
Intellect only understands language but as said, Pirsig has provided us with
a frame within which to expand its capabilities.

The genius of Pirsig was to realise this and introduce its liberating
component: Dynamic force (which drives evolution). It is that part that says
that all is provisional. We have our own analogues as individual,
cultural/social and intellectual SQ but this is not Reality.

DQ/SQ..the mystic force that is the mother of ten thousand things. And
because our Western intellects 'desire' we can see its manifestations and
when we remain (or return to become)  'desireless' we can see the mystery
(Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching).

This is what I believe Pirsig has tried to convey by this MoQ Code of Art. I
like it here/there.

For what it is worth.

Andre