[MD] Stuck on a Torn Slot

[david buchanan]

Marsha said:

 ...You've got here a far more complicated theory.  Static patterns of value were not even considered in ZMM.  I do not think your examples address the MoQ's intellectual static patterns of value.

dmb says:
I see no reason why this idea can't be extended into the second book. In fact, Pirsig says exactly the same thing except the motorcycle metaphor is gone.

"Now, it should be stated at this point that the MOQ SUPPORTS this dominance of intellect over society. It says that intellect is a higher level of evolution than society; therefore, it is a more moral level than society. ...But having said this, the MOQ goes on to say that science, the intellectual pattern that has been appointed to take over society, has a defect in it. The defect is that subject-object science has no provision for morals.  ...Now that intellect was in command of society for the first time in history, was THIS the intellectual pattern it was going to run society with?"

dmb continues:
In the first two sentences he's distinguishing social and intellectual values and he's putting intellect above the social in his evolutionary hierarchy. And we know from the larger text that the intellectual level is involved in two moral codes, one being its relation to the static level below it and the other being its relation to DQ. 
But then he goes on to say that science is the "intellectual PATTERN that has been appointed" and he asks if "this is the PATTERN it was going to run society with"? He's saying scientific objectivity is a pattern, a flaw in the intellect.
Taken together, he's saying what he says elsewhere. He says, "a culture that supports the dominance of intellectual values over social values is absolutely superior to one that does not." (Lila, p.311) But he is also saying it's flawed. And in both books, it's the same flaw. 

In ZAMM he says, "in scientific parlance the words for this absence of subject-object duality are scarce because scientific minds have shut themselves off from consciousness of this kind of understanding in the assumption of the formal dualistic scientific outlook." 

In Lila he says, "the MOQ goes on to say that science, the intellectual pattern that has been appointed to take over society, has a defect in it."

In both cases the flaw is this dualistic scientific outlook and this PATTERN is distinguished from the intellect itself. And of course a great deal of the text is in fact Pirsig using his analytic knife to dissect this pattern, to make a case against this pattern.

"The MOQ subscribes to what is called empiricism. It claims that all legitimate human knowledge arises from the senses or by thinking about what the senses provide. Most empiricists deny the validity of any knowledge gained through imagination, authority, tradition, or purely theoretical reasoning. They regard fields such as art, morality, religion and metaphysics as unverifiable. The MOQ varies from this by saying that the values of art and morality and even religious mysticism are verifiable, and that in the past they have been excluded for metaphysical reasons, not empirical reasons."

And then the status of subjects and objects are addressed more specifically when he explains explains radical empiricism. We find Pirsig quoting James at the end of chapter 29. There he says that subjects and objects are not metaphysical realities. They are secondary concepts "derived from something more fundamental which he [James] described as 'the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.' " 
The dualistic scientific outlook depends on believing that we are minds investigating an objective reality. But James and Pirsig turn that on its head. They say objective reality is a concept, an idea that comes from experience. They're demoting the ontological status of subject and objects. They de-reify subjects and objects. They're showing us how this is just an intellectual pattern, one that can be replaced, rather than the metaphysical starting points of reality. They're saying we are not stuck with that damaged screw. They're showing an intellectual way out. How else could an intellectual flaw be repaired except with great intellectual skill? And what could you replace it with if not better intellectual patterns? If the flawed pattern is equated with the whole or the general skill, that would mean we'd be stuck forever. But Pirsig uses that knife to carve the MOQ.

That's the same solution he was offering in ZAMM, except there are more nuts and bolts, a fully developed conceptual structure that only clarifies and articulates the solution already offered in ZAMM. The moral codes, particularly the code of art, accomplishes his original purpose of making intellect subservient to Quality rather than the reverse. Pirsig is going after this flaw to improve science and the intellect, not to condemn them. Notice how both books are parallel on this point too even though one has the moral hierarchy and the other doesn't.

"The Metaphysics of Quality says that science's empirical rejection of biological and social values is not only rationally correct, it is also morally correct because the intellectual patterns of science are of a higher evolutionary order than the old biological and social patterns. But the Metaphysics of Quality also says that Dynamic Quality - the value-force that chooses an elegant mathematical solution to a laborious one, or a brilliant experiment over a confusing, inconclusive one - is another matter altogether. Dynamic Quality is a higher moral order than static scientific truth, and it is as immoral for philosophers of science to try to suppress Dynamic Quality as it is for church authorities to suppress scientific method.  Dynamic value is an integral part of science.  It is the cutting edge of scientific progress itself." (LILA, p. 365-6)

 (Emphasis is Pirsig's in the original)
"But we know from Phaedrus' metaphysics that harmony Poincare talked about is NOT SUBJECTIVE. It is the SOURCE of subjects and objects and exists in an anterior relationship to them. It is NOT capricious, it is the force that OPPOSES capriciousness; the ordering principle of all scientific and mathematical thought which DESTROYS capriciousness, and without which no scientific thought can proceed. What brought tears of recognition to my eyes was the discovery that these unfinished edges match perfectly in a kind of harmony that both Phaedrus and Poincare talked about, to produce a complete structure of thought capable of uniting the separate languages of Science and Art into one." (ZAMM, p. 269-70)

------------------------------------------------------------ "I think that when this concept of peace of mind is introduced and made central to the act of technical work, a fusion of classic and romantic quality can take place at a basic level within a practical working context.  I've said you can actually *see* this fusion in skilled mechanics and machinists of a certain sort, and you can see it in the work they do.  To say that they are not artists is to misunderstand the nature of art. ... The mechanic I'm talking about doesn't make this separation.  One says of him that he is "interested" in what he's doing, that he's "involved" in his work.  What produces this involvement is, at the cutting edge of consciousness, an absence of any sense of separateness of subject and object.  "Being with it," "being a natural," "taking hold" - there are a lot of idiomatic expressions for what I mean by this absence of subject-object duality, because what I mean is so well understood as folklore, common sense, the everyday understanding of the shop.  But in scientific parlance the words for this absence of subject-object duality are scarce because scientific minds have shut themselves off from consciousness of this kind of understanding in the assumption of the formal dualistic scientific outlook."