[MD] The Quality/MOQ dichotomy

[skutvik at online.no]

David M. B. 

28 Feb. you wrote:

Bo before:
> ...DMB represents the view that the pre-everything's unity is
> destroyed by our "definitions and conceptualizations. 

 
dmb says:
> Huh? Concepts and definitions don't destroy anything......

For goodness sake, Pirsig's pitting Quality against MOQ is based on 
the false pre-concept/concept dichotomy that his Zen affliction has 
forced him into. And you follow like sheep even if you know that P.of 
ZAMM - in his initial thoughts about the Quality Idea - doesn't mention 
language, but speaks about Pre-intellect and Intellect.

The reason for this blunder may be Pirsig's wish to have William 
James on his side because James speaks about the Pre-something 
being followed by concepts (what Dewey says I don't know) Anyway 
once the pre/post language enters as some ersatz dynamic/static  it 
fouls the MOQ considerably because it is SOM to the core: language 
as subjective while what it is about as objective.     

> ...... They simply express and stabilize particulars. 

Language in the said SOM sense has no place in the MOQ's where it 
simply is a social pattern that ...as the 3rd. level is part of the 4th's 
fundament -  followed into the intellectual level. Here however it was 
split by intellect's S/O into the said pattern of being a subjective 
shadow of an objective reality. 

> These static patterns are derived from DQ and are distinguished from it
> like a snapshot captures and stabilizes a moment from the total visual
> field. 

Language as a social pattern (following into intellect) is necessarily 
"derived from DQ", but it was intellect that gave it this quality you 
speak of: a snapshot versus the visual field, which is a repetition of 
the pre-something being captured by language, so again this is 
entering SOM through the back door. I run like the proverbial Dutch 
boy (putting straw in the holes in the dikes) trying to stem all these 
somish-intellectual leaks.     

> I don't see how a photograph could destroy the world of light from
> which it is derived any more that I can see how static patterns destroy
> DQ. 

I soon start calling you names if you don't stop distorting the issue. It's 
PIRSIG who says that DQ is corrupted by the MOQ because it is 
formulated in static words. Language in this sense must not be 
allowed else we are back in SOM. 

> I was thinking about one of the early scenes in ZAMM, where all four
> travelers are outside their motel talking about ghosts. It's something
> like a prelude to what's coming. It's gonna be a bit of a ghost story
> insofar as the narrator is being pursued by Phaedrus and, more to the
> point, this scene is where the reader is introduced to the idea that
> the law of gravity is a ghost, that it's in the "mind" of Europeans
> and that this a cultural difference between Western people and the
> Indians who just don't see that kind of ghost.

This campfire talk I remember as giving me gooseflesh the first time I 
read ZAMM and the hunch that this was no ordinary book. Yes, the 
narrator says that Phaedrus was out to give reason a good beating 
which means - in a MOQ retrospect - he was out to undermine the 
intellectual level which is and remains the block to understanding the 
MOQ's "inside-out" turn of making Reason-as-intellect a static subset 
of its own Dynamic/Static matrix. But I can't remember him saying 
that Gravity is a ghost in the MIND I think it was Reason's mind/ 
matter ghost he was out to trash. (I don't have ZAMM on this 
computer) 

> On the other hand, the Indians have their own ghosts and that they seem
> just as real to Indians as gravity does to us. 

The ghost because Chris had asked him if he knew any ghost stories, 
and that it was the indians who "believed in ghosts (seen from reason) 
from the Indian p.o.v. it was their ancestors living in some realm 
beyond dependent on properly performed rituals to find peace - all 
social patterns.

> In the language of Lila, this is where the reader is introduced to the
> idea that there is more than one way to conceptualize experienced
> reality. This cultural difference can reasonable be compared to the
> difference between SOM and the MOQ, although the latter difference is
> philosophical and deliberate rather than simply inherited. 

"Conceptualize" ...? The Indians (social level people) has no notion of 
themselves conceptualizing anything this is intellect's S/O having 
mesmerized you David into believing it's ghost of a reality that can be 
conceptualized differently.

> This early scene is also the prelude to the attack on SOM. Here he is
> already saying that "gravity" is not objectively real, that it is
> subjective, contrary to what most Western people think. 

That is NOT what the Gravity example is about. He is challenging 
SOM's notion of a natural (objective) reality that sits out there waiting 
for science to discover the workings of, but as said I haven't ZAMM 
here so let's return to that. 

See you

Bodvar