[MD] Is this the inadequacy of the MOQ?

[John Carl]

To fair-minded readers everywhere,  let's see if dmb's construal of Pirsig's
rigidly anti-Absolutist stance actually fits the texts available.

On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 8:06 AM, david buchanan <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com>wrote:

 Pirsig mocks the Absolute and he grows increasingly annoyed as it becomes
> clearer and clearer that the Absolutists are just fancy theologians.
>

Copleston Annotations:

(RMP)

So It has really been a shock to see how close Bradley is to the MOQ. Both
he and the MOQ are expressing what Aldous Huxley called "The Perennial
Philosophy," which is perennial, I believe, because it happens to be true.
Bradley has given an excellent description of what the MOQ calls Dynamic
Quality and an excellent rational justification for its intellectual
acceptance.  It and the MOQ can be spliced together with no difficulty into
a broader explanation of the same thing.

A singular difference is that the MOQ says the Absolute is of value, a point
Bradley may have thought so obvious it didn't need mentioning. The MOQ says
that this value is not a property of the Absolute, it is the Absolute
itself, and is a much better name for the Absolute than "Absolute."
Rhetorically, the word "absolute" conveys nothing except rigidity and
permanence and authoritarianism and remoteness. "Quality," on the other hand
conveys flexibility, impermanence, here-and-now-ness and freedom. And it is
a word everyone knows and loves and understands even butcher shops that take
pride in their product.  Beyond that the term, value, paves the way for an
explanation of evolution that did not occur to Bradley.  He apparently
avoided discussing the world of appearances except to emphasize the need to
transcend it.  The MOQ returns to this world of appearances and shows how to
understand these appearances in a more constructive way.

John:

I claim that Royce was much, much closer to Pirsig than Bradley, because in
Royce's argument from the existence of error, Royce's Absolute is explicitly
Value.

But anyway, it's pretty clear that Pirsig has no problem equating Quality
with absolutism, except for certain rhetorical connotations which have
shifted over the years.  But we philosophers are not bound by mere
connotations, dave.  We like to get to the fundaments of things.  That's
what 'metaphysics' is, after all.

We also get an explanation of how and why Pirsig glossed over Absolute
Idealism in his earlier studies.  And we all know how Royce has been ignored
by the Academy since the turn of the century, so he's not been available for
study until the recent growth of the internet and the search engine.  The
only question I have, is the MoQ entirely rigid in it's approach to growth
and evolution of new insights, or is it just going to proclaim pedantic
parrotry as its highest good?