[MD] Problems with the Academic Approach

[david buchanan]

John said:
That's the problem with Quality in an academic matrix, and it's not a problem with Quality, it's a problem with the academic matrix.


Arlo replied:
I think you are conflating Quality with the MOQ. Certainly, one cannot (nor should try) to constrain "Quality in an academic matrix". ...you seem to be using the MOQ as a placeholder for the Quality-in-Living view as described in ZMM. ...But the MOQ IS an intellectual pattern, and as such is about "expanding rationality", which is an intellectual endeavor, one that is best served by the "academic" discourse of people like you, Ant, Granger, DMB, Matt, Steve and others. ... The MOQ is about an expanded rationality for reinterpreting experience, an intellectual endeavor.



dmb says:

Right. Dynamic Quality itself is different from The Metaphysics of Quality. As G. William Barnard might put it, we tell truths and touch realities. We defend our conceptualizations on paper but the primary living experience is felt and known by direct acquaintance. In that sense, DQ is not just outside the textbooks and classrooms. It's prior to words and concepts of any kind. But, like Arlo says, the MOQ is conceptual and verbal. As Pirsig says, it has to be or there isn't any metaphysics. There isn't any philosophy of any kind without words and concepts, including the MOQ. 

The trick is, the MOQ is build around DQ despite the fact that the word and the concept refers to the pre-verbal and the pre-conceptual. And including DQ is exactly what the expansion of rationality is all about. This is very important to understand, MOQers. This is the key to understand what it means to say that truth is a species of the Good. This is the key to understanding why the intellectual level is not the same thing as subject-object metaphysics. 


"He felt that the solution started with a new philosophy, or he was it as even broader than that - a new spiritual rationality - in which the ugliness and the loneliness and the spiritual blankness of dualistic technological reason would become illogical. Reason was no longer to be 'value free.' Reason was to be subordinate, logically, to Quality, and he was sure he would find the cause of its not being so back among the ancient Greeks, whose mythos had endowed our culture with the tendency to do what is 'reasonable' even when it isn't any good. That was the root of the whole thing. Right there. I said a long time ago that he was in pursuit of the ghost of reason. This is what I meant. Reason and Quality had become separated and in conflict with each other and Quality had been forced under and reason made supreme somewhere back then." (ZAMM 358)


"In the past our common universe of reason has been in the process of escaping, rejecting the romantic, irrational world of prehistoric man. It's been necessary since before the time of Socrates to reject the passions, the emotions, in order to free the rational mind for an understanding of nature's order which was as yet unknown. Now it's time to further an understanding of nature's order by reassimilating those passions which were originally fled from. The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man's consciousness, are a part of nature's order too. The central part. ...We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly. The time for real reunification of art and technology is really long overdue. (ZAMM 294)


 "But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding." 
"Our current modes of rationality are not moving society forward into a better world. They are taking it further and further from that better world. Since the Renaissance these modes have worked. As long as the need for food, clothing and shelter is dominant they will continue to work. But now that for huge masses of people these needs no longer overwhelm everything else, the whole structure of reason, handed down to us from ancient times, is no longer adequate. It begins to be seen for what it really is...emotionally hollow, esthetically meaningless and spiritually empty." 
 "We're living in topsy-turvy times, and I think that what causes the topsy-turvy feeling is inadequacy of old forms of thought to deal with new experiences. I've heard it said that the only real learning results from hang-ups, where instead of expanding the branches of what you already know, you have to stop and drift laterally for a while until you come across something that allows you to expand the roots of what you already know. Everyone's familiar with that. I think the same thing occurs with whole civilizations when expansion's needed at the roots." 
"Now I want to show that that classic pattern of rationality can be tremendously improved, expanded and made far more effective through the formal recognition of Quality in its operation." 
"It's long past time to take a closer look at this qualitative preselection of facts which has seemed so scrupulously ignored by those who make so much of these facts after they are "observed." I think that it will be found that a formal acknowledgment of the role of Quality in the scientific process doesn't destroy the empirical vision at all. It expands it, strengthens it and brings it far closer to actual scientific practice." 
"I think the basic fault that underlies the problem of stuckness is traditional rationality's insistence upon "objectivity," a doctrine that there is a divided reality of subject and object. For true science to take place these must be rigidly separate from each other." "When traditional rationality divides the world into subjects and objects it shuts out Quality, and when you're really stuck it's Quality, not any subjects or objects, that tells you where you ought to go."


 		 	   		  
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