[MD] Another parallel

[david buchanan]

dmb said:

In the MOQ, intellect is not amoral, objective or value-free and yet there is still coherence, logical consistency, agreement with experience, as well as elegance and simplicity. It has tremendous explanatory power, solves philosophical problem, and it begins with an alternative set of metaphysical assumptions. That, my friend, means it is intellectual without being SOM. Thus they cannot be identical.

Marsha replied:

I'm trying to understand what you are suggesting this MoQ is like.  Is this MoQ intellect, that shares the 4th level, experience like intuition and insight, or can it be stated in words.  Can you demonstrate it?


dmb says:
I'm not sure if I understand your question or what "it" is that you'd like to see demonstrated. The idea is simply that the Metaphysics of Quality is a metaphysical system and metaphysical systems are intellectual. "A metaphysics must be divisible, definable, and knowable, or there isn't any metaphysics." In other words, a metaphysics is necessarily static and conceptual. If it can't be stated in words, then it is not a metaphysics. "Since metaphysics is essentially a kind of dialectical definition and since Quality is outside of definition, this means a 'Metaphysics of Quality' is essentially a contradiction in terms, a logical absurdity." This is what it means to say that there is a discrepancy between concepts and reality. I suppose "intuition and insight" could be used to refer to DQ or the pre-conceptual reality, in which case they would be outside of definition too. "The central reality of mysticism, the reality that Phaedrus had called 'Quality' in his first book, is not a metaphysical chess piece. Quality doesn't have to be defined. You understand it without definition, ahead of definition. Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions".
SOM doesn't have a central undefined term like Quality but, like all metaphysics, it still "must be divisible, definable and knowable". It still has to be made up of concepts and has to be expressible in words "or there isn't any metaphysics". In that sense, the MOQ and SOM are two different pictures in the art gallery analogy. They are two different maps with different ways of depicting the same territory. They both use that analytical knife to carve up reality into conceptual pieces. (Those three explanations come from Pirsig too.) These are all just different ways to express the same basic idea, namely that SOM and the MOQ are rival sets of static intellectual patterns. That's what I mean by saying they are both intellectual while at the same time they are different from each other. By analogy, German culture and French culture are both cultures but that doesn't mean they're identical. Fords and Chevys are both cars but that doesn't mean they're identical. Likewise, SOM and the MOQ both exist as intellectual descriptions but this does not mean they are identical. And this why Bo's equation (Intellect = SOM) doesn't work. If intellect and SOM were the same thing, then there would be no possibility of ever having the MOQ or any other alternative metaphysics.


 
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