[MD] Reading & Comprehension

[david buchanan]

Mary said to dmb:
I can't find anywhere in Bo's comments where he equates the Social Level with Dynamic Quality itself.


dmb says:

Huh? That's a confused version of what I said. Bo mistake is not EQUATING the social level with DQ. His mistake is CONFUSING the social level with Arete. Bo takes Arete to mean the social level but Pirsig equates it with DQ. 



Mary saod:

... Now I figure you are zeroing in on Bo's use of the word "arête" in this phrase, " Socrates represents SOM's independence from the Arete past", and I say you really don't want to go there. ... But if your argument is that Bo is saying that arête = Dynamic Quality = The Social Level, then what am I to do with you, DMB? :)  Do you really think Bo is saying that Socrates escaped from Dynamic Quality?  This would be a straw man indeed.


dmb says:


I'm saying that Bo mistakenly equates arete with the social level. I think Bo doesn't understand what is meant by DQ, which is pretty much the whole point of Pirsig's work. See, I'm not disputing the idea that the intellectual level was being born out of the social level but I'm insisting that there is something else also going on. Pirsig traces our hollow forms of rationality back to the moment when Plato took the Arete (DQ) from the Sophists and turned it into a static form, an intellectual static form. This is not a case of putting the intellectual over the social but rather of putting the static over the dynamic. Take a look at the last few pages of chapter 29 in ZAMM and you'll see what I mean. The emphasis is Pirsig's in the original...


"QUALITY! VIRTUE! DHARMA! THAT is what the Sophists were teaching! NOT ethical relativism. NOT pristine 'virtue.' But ARETE. Excellence. Before the Church of Reason. Before substance. Before form. Before mind and matter. Before dialectic itself. Quality had been absolute. Those first teachers of the Western world were teaching QUALITY, and the medium they had chosen was that of rhetoric. He has been doing it right all along."

"But why? Phaedrus wondered. Why destroy ARETE? And no sooner had he asked the question than the answer came to him. Plato HADN'T tried to destroy arete. He had ENCAPSULATED it; made a permanent, fixed Idea out of it; had CONVERTED it to a rigid, immobile Immortal Truth. He made arete the Good, the highest of forms, the highest Idea of all. It was subordinate only to Truth itself, in a synthesis of all that had gone before. That was why the Quality that Phaedrus had arrived at in the classroom had seemed so close to Plato's Good. Plato's Good was TAKEN from the rhetoricians. Phaedrus searched, but could find no previous cosmologists who had talked about the Good. That was from the Sophists. The difference was that Plato's Good was a fixed and eternal and unmoving Idea, whereas for the rhetoricians it was not an idea at all. The Good was not a FORM of reality. It was reality itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed rigid way."

dmb says:

You see? The Sophists were teaching Quality, as in "reality itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way." I think it's obvious that he's talking about Arete as dynamic quality and he's explaining how it was converted by Plato into static quality, into a fixed and rigid thing.  


Mary said:
As I recall, Pirsig's point about arête was not that arete = DQ unequivocally as used by everyone in ancient Greece, but that it was a word with multiple layers of meaning with a very interesting past which may have evolved from the much older word rta which does seem to mean something similar in concept to DQ. - and, that the only reason all this fuss about this word is significant at all, is because Pirsig was looking for a precedent in history for the concept of Dynamic Quality.


dmb says:

Who said anything was unequivocal for everyone? I'm just saying that Pirisg identifies his own notion of Quality (DQ) with the Arete taught by the Sophists of ancient Greece. The textual evidence (above) is very clear about this point, don't you think? 

Again, the assertion that the intellectual level grew out of the social level is NOT in dispute. But there is something else going on too. The dynamic is being converted into the static. It's the price paid for intellect. Pirsig is saying we want intellect, but not at that price. The problem is that Bo (and you too, apparently) is misconstruing this other, more important aspect. Bo construes the Sophists as teaching static social quality instead of Dynamic Quality. That misses the central point of the book. It undermines the central point of the book and misconstrues the book's philosophical and dramatic climax. For my fifth example....


Bo said:

Socrates represents SOM's independence from the Arete past, here he is said to represents the intellectual level's independence of its social origin  (all levels have their origin in the former level).


dmb says:

In this sentence, Bo is equating SOM with intellect and equating Arete with the social level. I think each of those equations are incorrect and together these two notions create one helluva conceptual mess. 


Again, here is Bo misconstruing arete as social static quality:
"About Aretê being the social level in a MOQ retrospect is so obvious that you have to be hell-bent on NOT admitting it. It was the Homer's time in Greece  "...when the social level weren't yet transcended" as it says in LILA. 

Here's what Pirsig actually says about arete:
"QUALITY! VIRTUE! DHARMA! THAT is what the Sophists were teaching! ...Those first teachers of the Western world were teaching QUALITY, ... Plato HADN'T tried to destroy arete. He had ENCAPSULATED it; made a permanent, fixed Idea out of it; had CONVERTED it to a rigid, immobile Immortal Truth. ...The difference was that Plato's Good was a fixed and eternal and unmoving Idea, whereas for the rhetoricians it was not an idea at all. The Good was not a FORM of reality. It was reality itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed rigid way."

I don't see how it could make sense to describe static social quality as "reality itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed rigid way".  
  
Bo said:
... but it's plain silly to believe that DQ was more prominent at some particular time in history. And its just as plain that the Aretê represents social values, the duty, honour, valor, contempt for death  that Hector displays is the same as the islamists suicide "pilots" showed. This is the "paradise lost" longing.

dmb says:
Bo says it's plain silly, but I think that is exactly what Pirsig is saying. "And now he began to see for the first time the unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained the power to understand and rule the world in terms of dialectic truths, had lost. He had built empires of scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into enormous manifestation of his own dreams of power and wealth - but for this he had exchanged an empire of understanding of what it is to be a part of the world and not an enemy of it."  "And the bones of the Sophists long ago turned to dust ...buried so deep and with such ceremoniousness and such unction and such evil that only a madman centuries later could discover the clues needed to uncover them, and see with horror what had been done."


dmb had said to Bo:

...You repeatedly take this [pre-intellectual] as a reference to social static patterns. Because they evolved prior to intellect, you figure, social patterns are "pre-intellectual". What it actually refers to is the cutting edge of experience, the front edge of each moment, the eternal present. In other words, the pre-intellectual reality is Dynamic Quality, not social static quality.



Bo responded by simply repeating the mistake again:


.., in the MOQ context "intellect" is the last or highest level, thus what precedes intellect must necessarily have been the social, but mark you, all level have once been the "cutting edge" and the formation of a new level was in all cases as dynamic as dynamic comes. No problems there.


dmb says:

No problem there? There is a very, very big problem. Can you imagine static social quality getting you off that hot stove? Can you imagine that the front end of that moving freight train is Victorian virtue? Do you suppose Northrop's term (the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum) is a reference to honor and duty? Do you think James's "immediate flux of life" or "pure experience" is a reference to courage and loyalty? No, of course not. If you read "preintellectual" to mean static social quality, the most important ideas and examples no longer make any sense at all. This goes for ZAMM as well as Lila. I think anyone's understanding of what what Pirsig means by "pre-intellectual" is going to be improved when you compare it to the way this idea is expressed by other thinkers. Northrop and James are the most obvious choices because Pirsig was heavily influenced by the former and identifies his MOQ with the latter. Dewey talks about this too, in terms of experience that is HAD and experience as it is KNOWN, or simply as primary and secondary experience.I can assure you that none of these guys, including Pirsig, are talking about the difference between social and intellectual levels. They're talking about dynamic and static, about pre-intellectual and intellectual, undivided and divided, undifferentiated and differentiated, preconceptual and conceptual, immediate and reflective. This is about the DQ/sq distinction, not the social/intellectual distinction.

But hey, I've explained this more than a few times already but it just doesn't register. Bo sticks to his ridiculous nonsense no matter what anyone says. 

His english is way better than my norwegian but still, I can't help but wonder if Bo is losing something in translation. How a native english speaker can follow him in this wacky thinking, however, is hard for me to fathom. 



 		 	   		  
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