[MD] The Quality/MOQ dichotomy.

[Platt Holden]

Hey Andre,

> Bone of contention is: where is DQ?? within this metaphysical framework?
> Whenever we want to explain the MoQ to someone should we always have to
> stress that Quality is ASSUMED to be the foundation of all this (because
> it
> defies definition i.e having a clear intellectual referent)??

I've always thought of Quality as assumed to be the foundation like the 
fish who when asked how it liked being in the ocean replied, "What ocean?"
We are so immersed in Quality we don't recognize it. And, until Pirsig came 
along, we didn't even have a name for it.

>From another angle the following passage from Pirsig's SODV paper describes 
this immersive, foundational  phenomena:

"In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I described how the question, 
"What is quality?" had been arrived at, and I described the first attempt 
to solve it where Phaedrus thinks to himself: "Quality ... you know what it 
is, yet you don't know what it is. But that's self-contradictory. But some 
things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when 
you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it 
all goes poof! There's nothing more to talk about. But if you can't say 
what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it 
even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it 
doesn't exist at all. But for all practical purposes it really does exist. 
What else are the grades based on? Why else would people pay fortunes for 
some things and throw others in the trash pile? Obviously some things are 
better than others ... but what's the 'betterness'? ... So round and round 
you go spinning mental wheels and nowhere finding anyplace to get 
traction." 

"It was a common mischievous practice for students to send the same 
rhetoric paper to different teachers and observe that it got different 
grades. From this the students would argue that the whole idea of quality 
was meaningless. But one instructor turned the tables on them and handed a 
group of paper to several different students and asked each student to 
grade them for quality. As he expected, the student's relative rankings 
correlated with each other and with those of the instructor. This meant 
that although the students were saying there is no such thing as quality, 
they already knew what is was, and could not deny it. 

"So what I did is transfer that exercise into the classroom, having the 
students judge four papers day after day until they saw that they knew what 
quality is. They never had to say in any conceptual way what kind of object 
quality is but they understood that when you see it you know it. Quality is 
real even though it cannot be defined." 

> I'm beginning to ramble Platt. A large part ( I feel the most important
> part
> without which you cannot make sense of the MoQ) of Pirsig's M concerns
> the
> stage beyond the 4th level after the intellectual patterns have been
> 'killed'.

Maybe. But another way to look at it is as a stage prior to any level or 
any intellectual pattern -- the stage of pure Quality prior to concepts of 
any kind. Or to put it in the vernacular -- reality is what's happening 
while you're  thinking about it.  

Regards,
Platt