[MD] Loneliness

[David Thomas]

Bo,

I have gone back through your online (Quality Event & SOL(AQI)update) to
refresh myself on your positions. I have pull out some snips to see if I can
compare and contrast them with both James and Pirsig so see if we can work
our way out of this long running impasse.

>"I want to make the SOL my legacy.""BS SOL(AQI) update"

It is! It is! Rest assured, it is! Based on the experiences of recent US
politicians like the Clintons and Bushes active attention to "legacy
building" does not always turn out to be a good thing.(grin)


On 9/10/09 11:35 AM, "Bodvar Skutvik" <skutvik at online.no> wrote:

> Hi again Dave
> 
> 9 Sep.
> 
> (Bo earlier)
>>> Anyway this blunder resulted in the Quality/MOQ "meta-metaphysics"
>>> that overrides the MOQ and is a result from Pirsig's disastrous
>>> association with James whose view was Pre-conceptual/Conceptual.
>  
>> I scrambled for the subscribe button.
> 
> Good.
>  
>> I had been making what I think is my third pass though the 900 page
>> tome "The Writings of William James-A Comprehensive Edition- Edited by
>> John J McDermott and feeling philosophical decided to check the
>> discuss archive to review progress. Low and behold I hear you bashing
>> both Pirsig and James for screwing up the MoQ. Oh why? Oh why? I just
>> couldn't let it lie.
> 
> You may have noticed DMB's academical turn with focus on William
> James who "says the same as Pirsig" according to DMB.

No I didn't but somebody pointed it out. I hate it that I have to take up
where dmb (David Buchanan) left off as crossing wits with him in the past
always left a sour taste in my mouth.

> And he is 
> right in the sense that P in LILA says that James says that subjects
> and objects aren't primary, they are secondary concepts derived from
> the immediate flux and that this is matches the MOQ only that the
> immediate flux is Quality.
> But (as said to Ian) this makes MOQ's fundamental split Quality/
> Concepts. 

Not necessarily. I'll start with a few snippets of my highlighted version of
James' work and then see if I can put them into MoQ context.

"James introduces his notion of "pure experience." This is his name he gives
"to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later
reflection with its conceptual categories (E.R.E.,93) As a descriptive
category, "pure experience" is more expansive than the realities of thought
and thing, and cannot be reduced to any other single substance."

Part of the problem is how RMP got started with the quality question. It
started with the internal question "What the hell is Quality"  After he got
the S/O challenge, chose to slip between the horns, and all the other;
"quality" was the given start point. The split into DQ and SQ was the
results. I don't think that James would have had any problem naming "pure
experience" or "single substance" Dynamic Quality; provided it was more
useful, more valuable than not naming it. And I believe that it is.

"In writing on James, Gardner Murphy gives us a more specific historical
setting. Of all the nineteenth century currents most fundamentally congenial
to him, ...the most important was evolutionism; an evolutionism which meant
creativeness through struggle, the primacy of the immediate task to be done
over any abstraction which is removed from life."

Pretty Zen sounding, the religion not the book. Pirsig would probably agree
James and propose four broad and general evolutionary "conceptual
categories" to group those experiences into. Stable patterns of quality. So
we have:

James: Flux>Sensations>Perceptions>Conceptions.
Pirsig: DQ>cutting edge>SQ

James, as a doctor, was a little more detailed with the intermediate steps
but they start and end at much the same place.

What is kind of amazing is that James over a 100 years ago got so much right
when compared to the latest results indicated in "Loniness". Glad you've
read it.

> It may not bother the latter-day Pirsig who sees the MOQ as
> some disgusting, conceptual - static - by-product, but we who love the
> MOQ and sees with some skepticism [that] Pirsig will protest.

Do I detect a little bitterness here Bo. Legacy building can lead to that.
You have devoted a huge amount of time and effort over the years in dialogue
with people around the world in order to help them better understand the
MoQ. Compared to that accomplishment whether your SOL(AQI) is acknowledged
as true or false is nothing. Your passion and help is a much better good,
friend. 

Dynamic/Static, Pirsig's rhetorical skills could not stand for
Dyamic/stable. But big D, little s is more how the MoQ describes itself. Big
S ='s dead. My intellect is not dead, neither is yours, nor Pirsig's, YET.
But we're working on it. Still stable yet shot full through with dynamic.

> That's all for now, as a "freshman" you may look impartially on it, as for
> myself I'm a bit jaded.
   
I guess you mean "Fresh" "Man" as in fresh meat. But it's enough for me
today also. Next, I'll move on to the problems James might have with Pirsig.

Take care,

Dave