[MD] Problems with the Academic Approach

[david buchanan]

Arlo said:

...No one, certainly not me, would say that Quality is something the academics "can smack their lips on like some bon-bon". But the MOQ IS an intellectual pattern and as such is about "expanding rationality", which is an intellectual endeavor,.. The MOQ is about an expanded rationality for reinterpreting experience, an intellectual endeavor.


In response, Platt quoted Pirsig:

"Remember that the central reality of the MOQ is not an object or a subject or anything else. It is understood by direct experience only and NOT BY REASONING OF ANY KIND.(LC, Note 132 - emphasis added)


dmb says:

That's just what Pirsig says in chapter 5 of Lila.

"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. Quality is indivisible, undefinable and unknowable in the sense that there is a knower and a known, but a metaphysics can be none of these things. A metaphysics must be divisible, definable, and knowable, or there isn't any metaphysics. Since a metaphysics is essentially a kind of dialectical definition and since Quality is essentially outside definition, this means that a "Metaphysics of Quality" is essentially a contradiction in terms, a logical absurdity." (Lila 64)



He explains the same idea again in the opening of chapter 9 in Lila.

"In his book Phaedrus had tried to save Quality from metaphysics by refusing to define it, by placing it outside the dialectical chess board. Anything that is undefined is outside metaphysics, since metaphysics can only function with defined terms. If you can't define it you can't argue about it. He had demonstrated that even though you can't define Quality you still must agree that it exists, since a world from which value is subtracted becomes unrecognizable. But he realized that sooner or later he was going to have to stop carping about how bad subject-object metaphysics was and say something positive for a change. Sooner or later he was going to have to come up with a way of dividing Quality that was better than subjects and objects. He would have to do that or get out of metaphysics entirely. It's all right to condemn somebody else's bad metaphysics but you can't replace it with a metaphysics that consists of just one word." (Lila 107)


"Anyway, all this certainly answered the question of whether the Metaphysics of Quality was a foreign, cultish, deviant way of looking at things. The MOQ is a continuation of the mainstream of twentieth century American philosophy. It is a form of pragmatism, of instrumentalism, which says the test of the true is the good. It adds that this good is not a social code or some intellectualized Hegelian Absolute. It is direct everyday experience. Through this identification of pure value with pure experience, the MOQ paves the way for an enlarged way of looking at experience which can resolve all sorts of anomalies that traditional empiricism has not been able to cope with." (Lila 366)


Pirsig's use of the terms "pure experience" and "traditional empiricism" are references to the radical empiricism of William James, which he's just explained in the pages leading up to this quote. And please notice how he is identifying James's "pure experience" with his own "pure value" or "Dynamic Quality". 






 		 	   		  
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