[MD] CA1

[John Carl]

I like the RMP in red, reminds me of reading the bible in church when I was
bored.  If y'all don't object, I'd like to try and keep it in.  If there's
any objection, I'll reformat.

Cop:

In the second half of the nineteenth century idealism became the dominant
philosophical movement in the British universities.

John:
Now why do you think that is?  What sort of culture flows from a
philosophical movement?  Or is it the other way around?  DO intellectual
patterns go off on their own paths, evolving according to a natural building
on previous beliefs, into new patterns purposed on their own?

Or, do they just arise from a culture's social miliue?

I think to disentangle the two, we have to consider both.  Let's consider
the "bloody sun never sets" British Empire of the 19th century and we see a
couple of interesting factors.  First, Ideals were more responsible for the
conquering of the world, than resources or any obvious material wealth.  The
British conquered all, by intelligent applications of industrial wealth,
created through a capitalistic system which encouraged innovation and
competition.  But underneath it all, was a faith, a faith in God and Country
and System, which reinforced the performance of idealistic behavior -
oriented around honor and trust, which made the whole thing work.

I think the affinity for Idealism then, oughta be recognized and understood
in this light.  That in the British Empire, ideals were more than
high-sounding phrases, they were actually creative of material success.


Cop:

It was not, of course, a question of subjective idealism. If this was
anywhere to be found, it was a logical consequence of the phenomenalism
associated with the names of Hume in the eighteenth century and J. S. Mill
in the nineteenth century. For the empiricists who embraced phenomenalism
tended to reduce both physical objects and minds to impressions or
sensations, and then to reconstruct them with the aid of the principle of
the association of ideas.

John:
Well it makes sense to me.  I get a sense of myself, and a sense of this
world I percieve, arising in tandem and together.  Given a choice, I like
the associations of dancing, and this dance is being.  But that doesn't seem
too far off reconstructing impressions through principles of association.

Cop:

They implied that, basically, we know only phenomena, in the sense of
impressions, and that, if there are metaphenomenal realities, we cannot know
them.

John:

Quality is unknowable, but I don't think it's quite "metaphenomenal" as it
permeates and is the underlying generator of conceptualized phenomena.  But
that might be the same thing, since whatever metaphenom they were construing
(they referring to Hume and Mill) was at least partially known.  Pointed to
with the finger, the moon.  All that.

RMP:

This is what the MOQ states. Right away it diverges from the absolute
idealism that follows. Quality is a phenomenal reality.

John:

Hey! No fair reading ahead.

Cop:

The nineteenth-century idealists, however, were convinced that
things-in-themselves, being expressions of the one spiritual reality which
manifests itself in and through the human mind, are essentially
intelligible, knowable.

RMP:

In the MOQ there are no things in themselves.

John:
All right, Mr. Pirsig.  Let's pause for a minute.  Where does "things in
themselves" come from, anyway?  Kant, right?  What does it mean?  Doesn't it
mean, "objectively".  Like a tree falling in the forest, when there's nobody
to observe, is still a thing, a happening.  In itself.  Now, if the 19th
century idealists, used different terminology, expressed this "one spiritual
reality which manifests itself in and through the human mind" used a
different term, called it "Quality" or the Tao, would we be ok with their
definition then?

If so, then I'd say that they themselves were making the same point as the
MoQ, and there are no things in themselves.

Cop:

Subject and object are correlative because they are both rooted in one
ultimate spiritual principle.


RMP:

This is also true in the MOQ.

John:
Ok then.  I think we are settling in a bit to our style here.  I see you are
reading quickly and reactively, which has a certain Quality, but if you miss
depths due to confusing connotation, we'll take that into account.  But this
is good.

Cop:

It was thus a question of objective rather than subjective idealism.

RMP:

In the MOQ the term, objective, is reserved for inorganic and biological
patterns and cannot include idealism.


John:
Ok, this is the flippant, off-the-cuff thing I was noticing.  You always
liked the way you could recreate the S/O split down two and two, but I ain't
buying it.  A biological animal is not a mere object, with lofty man the
social and intellectual subject.  Here we diverge, of course, because I view
the S/O split as born in infant mammalian nurture, with those animals
starting to evolve true social patterning.

But more to the point, you're dodging here the deeper issue that you
yourself put the MoQ into the Objective Idealism camp with the last word in
Lila.  "Good is a noun" equates  to objective idealism.


Cop:

Nineteenth-century British idealism thus represented a revival of explicit
metaphysics. That which is the manifestation of Spirit can in principle be
known by the human spirit. And the whole world is the manifestation of
Spirit.

RMP:

It would seem at first appearance that Quality might be an equivalent of
Spirit, but this would be an enormous mistake. Quality is spiritual only to
the extent that motorcycles and sausages are spiritual.

John:

motorcycles and sausages are spiritual.  duh.  The buddha can be found in
simple things. I don't quite get how making that claim would be "an
enormous" mistake.

Cop:

Science is simply one level of knowledge, one aspect of the complete
knowledge to which the mind tends, even if it cannot fully [172] actualize
its ideal. Metaphysical philosophy endeavours to complete the synthesis.

RMP:

The MOQ agrees with this.

John:

And well it should!  Since an endeavor to reunite art and science has always
been the goal.


Cop:

The idealist metaphysics was thus a spiritualist metaphysics, in the sense
that for it ultimate reality was in some sense spiritual. And it follows
that idealism was sharply opposed to materialism.

RMP:

The MOQ is not opposed to materialism as long is it is understood that
materialism is a set of ideas.

John:

Well it is by Idealists, and it's not by materialists.

Cop:

In so far indeed as the phenomenalists tried to go beyond the dispute
between materialism and spiritualism by reducing both minds and physical
objects to phenomena which cannot properly be described either as spiritual
or as material, we cannot legitimately call them materialists. But these
phenomena were evidently something very different from the one spiritual
reality of the idealists.

John:

Well it looks to me like this dispute resonates to my opposition to dmb and
the pure experiencers.  I posit Quality as the one spiritual reality, and he
emphasizes the DQ of pure experience. This means dave's a phenomenalist?  I
didn't realize.

Cop:

And in any case we have seen that on the more positivistic side of the
empiricist movement there appeared an at least methodological materialism,
the so-called scientific materialism, a line of thought for which the
idealists had no sympathy.



RMP:

If the Quantum theory can be called scientifically materialistic, then the
MOQ supports scientific materialism.

John:

Ya know, Perfessor, you shouldn't write like that.  It's confusing to the
ones of your followers who don't know what a syllogism is.  They tend to
overlook "if" and just let their eyeballs rest on the lines that soothe
their preconceptions.  Scientific Materialism is about as SOM an enterprise
as there is.  The MoQ is antithetical to it, just like the idealists.

And here I rest for now.  Comments and arguments encouraged.