[MD] Swan Song

[Joseph Maurer]

So long, Bo!  I'll really miss you!


On 5/18/08 11:48 AM, "skutvik at online.no" <skutvik at online.no> wrote:

> MOQ Discuss. 
> 
> This began as a reply to Joe but grew into an essay and will be a
> "swan song" for me because am to withdraw for an indeterminable
> time (did I hear a sigh of relief)
> 
> On 13 May Joseph Maurer wrote:
> 
>> A discussion among friends!  I like that. Yes, Bo, I lived before
>> Pirsig wrote ZAMM or LILA.  I had an education and I approach MOQ
>> with respect, but it is not all that I think about.  My
>> understanding of your concern is that we should not discuss
>> evolution from any other viewpoint than MOQ.  You understand Pirsig
>> as saying that the highest level he discusses is SOL. ....
> 
> SOL (the 4th. level=S/O) has implications for the MOQ but doesn't
> question its basic tenet (so it's no sectarian) namely that reality's
> deepest split isn't S/O but DQ/SQ consequently the SOM was and
> remains MOQ's antagonist and most telling, nowhere in the history of
> philosophy do I find anyone identifying a SOM, perhaps because it's
> SOM's history  (the wood and the trees metaphor) Like all levels it was
> progress at first, only much later - as its complexity grew - did it start to
> spawn "platypus" and around young Phaedrus' time they had become
> acute, hence ZAMM's crusade against SOM, and perhaps why LILA
> doesn't mentiones it,  Phaedrus had been "killed" by intellect's (SOM's)
> immune system) and the emerging Pirsig had forgotten his earlier
> ideas.   
> 
> There seemingly were earlier efforts to tackle the S/O enigma, Hegel's
> metaphysics began as an alternative to Immanuel Kant (who was
> SOM' final word) but it didn't succeed, his (Hegel's) saying that "the
> thing in itself" is even more ineffable than Kant postulated it just
> cements it further. And his saying that there is nothing outside
> "thinking" does not remove what thinking is about. No, the S/O is
> ineradicable,  Phaedrus stroke of genius was to postulate another
> metaphysic that integrates SOM. This last point is crucial and where
> Pirsig betrays Phaedrus original MOQ. At this site we see that no one
> ever applies the MOQ to anything *) without such an integration (the
> SOL) the MOQ has zero point zero explanatory power.
> 
> *) An exception for Platt and Chris.
> 
> As we know ZAMM points to ancient Greece as SOM's birthplace and
> that it went into hibernation during the Middle Ages. Most telling
> because the S/O split seems not to have concerned the Medieval
> thinkers, to them everything was about religion and if God was a spirit
> (S) or flesh (O) was no issue. This fits because the Middle Ages was a
> retreat to the social-mythological level where the non-S/O is absent.
> With the Renaissance (intellect rebounding) the SOM gradually re-
> emerged, Descartes is a name here, not that he addressed the S/O as
> a problem (at this stage it was entirely a progress) he merely stated
> the fact that man was a (thinking) subject entirely distanced from the
> material world.  
> 
> With Spinoza however the S/O starts to be a topic for philosophical
> discourse and with the empiricists it became a real headache
> climaxing with Berkeley who demonstrates without a hitch that there is
> nothing "out there" all qualities are created by our senses (subjective).
> This sounds much like Phaedrus of ZAMM addressing the objective
> horn of the S/O dilemma, but these philosophers differ from him by
> NOT identifying the S/O as a metaphysics, they took it for God-given.
> Even Berkeley who refuted a material world postulates that it existed in
> God's "mind"   
>  
> As said Immanuel Kant came to represent SOM's final word. Not only
> are the sense qualities (taste, smell, sound, colors) subjective, time,
> space and causation are also man-made "filters" that reality is strained
> through before it reaches consciousness. What the said reality is
> before being filtered (the thing in itself) is completely and utterly
> ineffable. He called his own ideas a "Copernican Revolution". Earlier
> philosophy  believed that nature showed us its laws, rules and
> relationships etc. but it was the other way: these originated in (our)
> mind.   
> 
> And thus things stood when Pirsig arrived, Kant had closed the case
> on SOM, he dominated western philosophy so completely that no
> thinkers after him raised the S/O issue. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Marx,
> all took up some other aspect of existence, so did Heidegger, Husserl
> and Sartre. Even Pirsig in ZAMM began by applying Kant to his
> motorcycle discourse so also he saw this as our time's premises. And
> young Phaedrus' dropping out of school was after encountering the
> S/O- generated paradoxes (that the number of hypothesis to explain
> any phenomenon is infinite) but at that point he saw it as a flaw in
> reality's fabric, only much later he had Quality epiphany and the
> realization that the S/O was a metaphysics that had entered history at
> a particular time.
> 
> The rest we know. He presented the first alternative to SOM by
> postulating that subjects and objects were a product of Quality and
> that the metaphysics based on them (SOM) had arrived with the
> ancient Greeks. In ZAMM only subjects and objects were the first
> Romantic/Classic MOQ's (classic=static) subset and - most telling -
> called "intellect". In LILA the static range had grown to four levels, but
> the intellectual was no longer S/O, but something that resembled
> SOM's mind. Later he tried to mend it (the Turner letter) but the
> "symbol manipulation" was even worse than the mindish one.
> 
> I don't know if this has brought the SOL point across to you (Joe) I
> have the impression that most people believe that Pirsig's message is
> that everything is theories and that reality (now called Quality)  is as
> much beyond our grasp as it was to Kant. And no wonder after all he
> says that the MOQ is just a theory about Quality. But this is the wrong,
> the real Quality message is:
> 
> 1) "There's no reality beyond a metaphysics (no one can avoid
> metaphysics).
> 
> 2)  MOQ's metaphysical split is along the DQ/SQ axis.
> 
> 3) The highest static stage is the S/O (now no longer a metaphysics
> but a value) 
> 
> Only this way the SOM is safely assimilated, any other arrangement
> makes the MOQ a SOM subsidiary. Now a more sober tone, My folly is
> to believe that something as enormous as a metaphysical (SOM-
> MOQ) shift can happen overnight. Three centuries passed between
> the quest for eternal  principles and the first outlines of SOM with
> Aristotle, and we don't know how many conflicts took place during this
> time (except the Plato/Sophists one) and now it's just thirty-some
> years since ZAMM's publication. It will certainly be a long haul before
> "our" Aristotle arrives.
> 
> Joe ctd:
> 
>>  I agree with that, but from my experience I accept a way of talking
>> SOL that would accept that evolution is not completely dormant even
>> when MOQ is the focus.  Perhaps evolution has continued, and there
>> is a MOQ meta-level in consciousness only?  How many more levels?
> 
> In SOM "evolution" usually means the biological one, but it also covers
> the big picture from the formation of stars and planets, the emergence
> of biological life on earth that eventually became imbued with mind and
> rose above it all and became self-conscious. Hence SOM's impossible
> conclusion: The world  is either a mind  product or mind an
> evolutionary fallout.  With the advent of the MOQ evolution is the static
> levels, their emergence and internal growth, and about that we have
> an endless source for investigation.
> 
> So long
> 
> Bo          
> 
>        
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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