[MD] Loneliness

[skutvik at online.no]

Hi Dave

12 Sep. you wrote: 

> On with the Pirsig/James connexion.
 
> I left off with comparison of Pirsig's DQ>SQ being similar to James:
> flux>concepts. As you pointed out else where ZMM Quality turns up as
> Lila's Dynamic Quality but the "undefined Quality" migrates to be
> superimposed above it. Here's RMP's dilemma if he leaves DQ-SQ he has
> a dualism just like the S-0 he is railing against. But uniting the two
> into a monism means introducing an extra undefined term. But if RMP
> was to reach his goal of uniting MoQ with the "one" of Zen he seems to
> have had little choice.

I see your point, and very generally I agree, Pirsig's obsession was 
Quality = Reality, the MOQ divided it and that wasn't so "valuable", 
yet I think he overdid it, Reality is Quality even if DQ/SQ-divided, that 
may be you point below about James?  I have read it all - several 
times - to try to catch James' somewhat antiquated English. 

Yet, I can't leave the metaphysical openings in ZAMM that starts by 
comparing it with a motorcycle diagrams and I think this put things on 
a wrong track.. A MC sits there unharmed by diagramatical splittings 
but not so with existence. From here follows the first mistake, the 
SOM diagram which has a "Reality box" on top, but that's not so, 
SOM does not postulate anything ahead of its divide, rather two 
realities: subjective and objective. 

Then the Quality diagram where Reality is replaced by Quality (the 
Quality=Reality axiom) and then divided the known DQ/SQ way, but 
my assertion is that these diagrams should have looked like this. 

                                   SOM      

                        OBJECTIVE REALITY
                                       !
                        SUBJECTIVE REALITY

because this is what SOM postulates: An objective - material - reality 
that has spawned a subjective - mind - reality.

                                  MOQ:  

                         DYNAMIC QUALITY
                                       !
                         STATIC QUALITY

This is what the MOQ postulates: A dynamic reality  that has spawned 
(levels of) static quality.  

> As I posted elsewhere James was highly critical of monist
> philosophies. He thought they led to highly static Absolutist
> positions and interpretations.

Could not agree more.

> As a pluralist James could have helped. In MoQ terms he was not only
> interested in the patterns of value but the relationships between. His
> short 1909 version of Radical Empiricism states:

Pluralist? There can only be dualisms, but OK

> "Radical empiricism consists first of a postulate,next of a statement
> of fact, and finally of a generalized conclusion."
 
> "The postulate is that the only things that shall be debatable among
> philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience.
> [Things of an unexperienceable nature may exist ad libitum, but they
> form no part of the material for philosophical debate]"
 
> "The statement of fact is that the relations between
> things,conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of
> direct particular experience, neither more or less so, than the things
> themselves."
 
> "The generalized conclusion is that therefore the parts of experience
> hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts
> of experience. The directly apprehended universe needs, in short, no
> extraneous trans-empirical connective support, but possesses in its
> own right a concatenated or continuous structure."
 
> Under James way of thinking rather that Q (an undefined given) being
> split into DQ and SQ (which would make them subsets of Q) the
> relationship could be described as DQ is the sum off all "conjunctions
> and disjunctions" of individual DO/SQs hanging together to make up a
> single "concatenated or continuous" Q. The many, the parts hang
> together to make up the one; rather than the undefined one subdivided
> into the parts.
 
> This helps in several ways. First my DQ does not equal your DQ.
> They're similar but different not just because you are in Norway and
> I'm in Arkansas. I experience my thoughts, ideas, aches and pains but
> you do not. (Lucky you!) My flux of sensations are not just of the
> external but also my internal world. And I try to order stable
> patterns out of both. So do you. Then we come together in groups and
> try to make a good, agreeable order of all those different experiences
> into a whole. The stable level called intellect evolved out of the
> social thus it is both an individual and community endeavor.

How well-meaning all this is Dave, I feel a certain uneasiness. "My 
DQ and your DQ"?. We are the static levels, existence's dynamic 
aspect is something terrible - in Biblical terms like "the face of God" 
that no lives to see. Phaedrus had an encounter with it and he "died", 
but the MOQ grew from that encounter. And the fact remains that 
MOQ's continental divide is dynamic/static not dynamic/conceptual 
that Pirsig "catched" from James and this will haunt the MOQ forever 
if not sorted out..  


 
> Second we all have a creative relationship with Quality, the whole,
> the one. We constantly rearrange it. RMP dynamically rearranged a
> portion of the physical, biology, social and intellectual patterns of
> value to created the stable patterns called ZMM and Lila. You do the
> same every time you pick up a brush. We all do in some way or another.
 
> Now that I've screwed off Saturday morning, I need to get the chainsaw
> working on the huge piles of limbs still left over from the spring ice
> storm. Chainsawing is not really a Zen thing, The ever present danger
> focus the attention, but the noise messes with the ONE and the all.

Ice storms must be something special for Southern USA, even in our 
semi-arctic conditions that kind of storm is unknown.

Bodvar