[MD] mindless metaphysics

[Ron Kulp]

"the only pragmatist element I see in the Metaphysics of Quality is
Pirsig's desire and intention to get to real life - to get to "the
stuffy, hot-ground floor of life as soon as possible" as Matt poetically
puts it. But the actual tool of thought which the concept of Quality
provides is miles away from pragmatism. The problem Pirsig had was there
was no rationalist framework in which his magisterial tool could make
sense and unfold. For, if you say that Quality presupposes an
intelligence in the world in which human reason can share and
participate, because this intelligence partakes of a deep structure
common to both the world and to human minds, where's the dynamic element
in reason itself? It is at this point that Owen Barfield's insights
bring considerable assistance, for Barfield speaks of an evolution of
reason, or rather of an evolution of consciousness. This concept is the
missing key, for it enables us to attach the concepts of Static and
Dynamic Quality to reason itself."

 

"I would agree with Matt that Pirsig is not free of subject-object
metaphysics. Nor do I think that Pirsig claimed to be altogether free of
it. What is significant in Pirsig is that he provides indications for a
route to take outside of the particular cul-de-sac which SOM has led to
in post-Enlightenment philosophy. And that particular cul-de-sac is not
so much the subject-object distinction in itself (which is an ancient
distinction going back to the earliest beginnings of human thought and
which may indeed be an inescapable feature of any form of thought) as it
is the particular twist it has taken through Cartesian and modern
philosophy."

-Caryl Johnston      source: http://meta-q.blogspot.com/

 

 

Ron:

I think Bo's SOL interpretation provides the framework, but if he
maintains that SoM is the Intellectual level itself then SOL might fall
to the same trap as SOM by believing it is the ONLY

Way to interpret a Quality reality. The one true path is never the only
true path. Therefore James Radical Empiricist method may indeed be a
more suitable rational framework for MoQ.

 

As Caryl Johnston states, "The problem Pirsig had was there was no
rationalist framework in which his magisterial tool could make sense and
unfold"  I feel she suspected the same thing as Bo but fail to see the
cultural implications that SOM brings to the MoQ table in contrast to
the "Big picture" that MoQ

Ultimately supplies. It's tying these two together that brings the
weirdness. Especially when you start making the shifts from SOL to MOQ

As DmB said  "things get weird." But I truly believe in my "softened "
explanation, it works. 

 

 

 

 

"Newly acquired insights are at first only half understood by the one
who begets them, and appear as complete nonsense to all others... Any
new idea which does not appear very strange at the outset, does not have
a chance of being a vital discovery." 
-- Niels Bohr