[MD] Overcoming the System

[Steve Peterson]

> Matt:
>  _The MoQ_ has no entity outside of Pirsig: it is _his_ philosophy, 
> _his_ writing.  For Pirsig, or anyone, to say that the MoQ recognizes 
> it's own contingency, or that it will itself be transcended, is just 
> to say that _Pirsig_ is a finite, historically situated being.  It is 
> just to remind us of the fact that the system was created by a person 
> responding to his own personal, unique problems, which as general as 
> they sometimes may appear to be, may not always be our own problems, 
> particularly in the new, yet unforeseeable future.
>
> We _have_ to come back to the individual a lot more often than we do 
> when reading Pirsig.  Pirsig himself would seem to suggest it, and the 
> conceptual machinery is important, but it is _not_ the end, it is only 
> the _means_, in the bigger picture of life.
>

Agreed. See Baggini interview:


BAGGINI: ...a phrase you often use, with many variants, is, “The 
Metaphysics of Quality says” as though the MOQ was a kind of 
philosophical Rosetta Stone and once you had it you could simply read 
off what it has to say about whatever philosophical problem confronts 
you.

Do you think you made a mistake in presenting the MOQ in such static 
terms in LILA?


PIRSIG: The alternative to “The Metaphysics of Quality says,” would be 
“I, Robert Pirsig, says,” and that repeated many times sounds worse to 
me...If the term, “static” is being used here as it is used by the 
Metaphysics of Quality itself, then the answer is, “All metaphysical 
systems are static intellectual patterns. There isn't any other kind of 
metaphysics.” This is so because the MOQ describes intellect itself as 
a set of static patterns.



Notice that Pirsig basically says "The MOQ" = "RMP's philosphy"