[MD] A larger system of understanding

[david buchanan]

Platt offered the following Pirsig quote as further evidence that including the MOQ in the intellectual level doesn't make sense.


"The Metaphysics of Quality resolves the relationship between intellect and society, subject and object, mind and matter, by embedding all of them in a larger system of understanding. Objects are inorganic and biological values; subjects are social and intellectual values." (Lila, 24)

Platt commented on this "evidence":
Perhaps someone can explain, if the MOQ is a set of subjective intellectual values how it can see itself as a set of subjective system of values --  the problem an eye seeing itself.    For me the explanation is that the MOQ is a larger system of understanding because unlike intellectual values, it admits a nonintellectual value, DQ, leading to the conclusion that the essence of the MOQ is only understood from a mystic, not an intellectual, perspective. The MOQ escapes the intellectual level by including within its system of understanding that, "Thought is not a path to reality," a direct contradiction of intellectual values.



dmb says:

I think it helps to quote the entire paragraph AND to understand the context of the whole paragraph, which is about the moral codes and levels, particularly the relationship between social and intellectual values. He's explaining one the problems with the age-old "belief that thought is independent of society, that it stands alone, born without parents." It goes back to the Greeks but in our own scientific age, it says the truth "is to be determined by direct observation, not hearsay". This is what Pirsig is disputing in the quote. Instead, he says, "Our scientific descriptions are always culturally derived. Nature tells us only what our culture predisposes us to hear." This is also where he corrects Descartes famous line: "The 17th century French culture exists, therefore I think, therefore I am." Then we get Platt's "evidence".



"The Metaphysics of Quality resolves the relationship between intellect and society, subject and object, mind and matter, by embedding all of them in a larger system of understanding. Objects are inorganic and biological values; subjects are social and intellectual values. They are not two mysterious universes that go floating around in some subject-object dream that allows them no real contact with one another. They have a matter-of-fact evolutionary relationship. That evolutionary relationship is also a moral one." (Lila, 24)


In other words, intellect was not born without parents and is not independent from society. They are both products of evolution and the former grew out of the latter. They are not disconnected or independent of each other. This larger system removes the gap between mind and matter or subjects and objects in the same way. This are no longer taken as separate universes but as stages in the growth within a single universe. The boy becomes the man. The distinction is not ontological but historical and qualitative. But here we are only talking about re-ordering our conceptions of static realities, conceptually defined categories. This is the structure of the MOQ, which is an intellectual description as any metaphysical system must be. That's WHY there will also be a discrepancy between "reality" and the MOQ. In that case, were talking about the difference between immediately lived experience and our conceptualizations, between DQ and sq. 

See, by Platt's "reasoning", the "MOQ escapes the intellectual level by including within its system of understanding that, "Thought is not a path to reality," a direct contradiction of intellectual values." But that's NOT a contradiction of intellectual values. Pirsig is just saying that thoughts are static but the primary empirical reality is not static. Static patterns are derived from experience the way a bucket of water is derived from an ongoing stream. Concepts only capture and isolate some tiny portion of an overflowing, inexhaustible experiential reality. The quality of our concepts is measured by their ability to function within the ongoing process of living, their ability to serve this evolutionary process and to serve us in the art of living, as David Granger would say. The MOQ is a philosophy and so it has to be static and intellectual or there wouldn't be any MOQ. And as a set of static intellectual patterns, it can never contain the direct experience from which it is derived. That's the container problem. Truth is a species of the good, is derived from the good and is subservient to the good.


                                                                                                      "He felt that the solution started with a new philosophy, or he saw 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 that would find the cause of its not being so back among the ancient Greeks, whose mythos had endowed our culture with the tendency underlying all the evil of our technology, the tendency TO DO WHAT IS 'REASONABLE' EVEN WHEN IT IS'NT 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, chapter 29, emphasis is Pirsig's.)



Thanks, 

dmb





 		 	   		  
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