[MD] freewill

[david buchanan]

dmb said to Marsha:
...These are metaphysical posits and that's what is being rejected, the notion that there is some kind of entity behind thoughts and things.
Marsha replied:
Which exact "metaphysical posits" are you talking about.    Posted by Pirsig's?  By Descartes?  By Santa Claus's?

dmb says:
Wow. You're even more confused than I thought. The metaphysical posits I'm talking about are subjects and objects and yes, they were posited by Descartes. That's why Pirsig and lots of other philosophers call this subject "the Cartesian self". It is the conception of the self adopted by most Modern philosophers. That's what Pirsig and James are rejecting, not to mention John Dewey and a whole bunch of other pragmatists. But, like I said, that doesn't mean that Robert Pirsig is a fiction. Somehow, miraculously, he can reject the Cartesian self and still collect royalty checks at his fixed address. Like I said, Pirsig is saying that you and he are better conceived as a complex ecology of processes rather than some essential thing. Pirsig is saying that there is no entity that does the thinking or rather that the thinking itself is the thinker.

Marsha said:
Ohhhhh, you have left the MoQ for a higher, broader intellectual context.   From what theoretical platform are these statements being made?   Do I get a hint? 

dmb says:
No, I haven't left the MOQ. I'm simply telling you that the MOQ rejects what SOM says about the self. And you're confusing that with the MOQ's conception of the self. You're rejecting the complex ecology of static patterns along with the Cartesian self, as if they were the same thing. They are not at all the same. You're rejecting the MOQ's conception of the self as a ridiculous fiction. Like I said, you're totally missing the point and you have a deeply confused notion of what is being rejected. 

Again - and it is not hyperbole - the consequences of your view is that it leads to a rather vacuous nihilism. If you and me and Pirsig are all just useful fictions, then the notion that static reality is made of value all the way down is completely wrecked. In your hands, the whole evolutionary moral hierarchy becomes some meaningless dream. Why worry about all the suffering people in the world if they're just illusions? 

No, that's just a disaster and it's also wildly incorrect. I mean, Pirsig is asserting the reality of Quality and he's saying that our conceptual understanding have real consequences in the world. Rejecting SOM isn't just some academic exercise. It's about correcting the negative consequences at the cultural and personal levels. Isn't the main point of the MOQ to assert that excellence is the most real of all? The source and substance of everything. Pirsig is saying it would be best to act as if reality - yes, all the normal, conventional static realities, including ourselves - is made of values all the way down. Treat the world and ourselves as static patterns of VALUE is going to have very different consequences than would follow if we treated the same as a fiction. The latter is a complete reversal of the MOQ's world and it would result in an outrageous moral nightmare. Ironically, SOM already led us to the same vacuous nihilism where nothing is right and nothing is wrong because values aren't real. Everything just functions, like machinery. That's the central problem the MOQ is supposed to address but your reading just puts us right back in the meaningless soup of it all.


Look, on the common sense level the MOQ is just saying that the self is not some disembodied soul or entity. INSTEAD, the MOQ says the self is a thing like any other thing and exists in relation to things. The self is also a biological organism with eyes and ears and everything and it exists in relation to other biological organisms. The self is also a social being, a language user and exists in relation to other members of the society. The self is also (hopefully) an intellectual being whose understandings exist in relation to wider discourse. And that complex ecology of static patterns exists within the ongoing flux of life. Betterness is the game. Caring, engaged, artful living is what it recommends. 
Provisional does not mean fictional. Plural truth does not mean truth is an illusion. Rejecting Descartes does not mean you get a life-long moral vacation. Rejecting essentialist notions of fixed and eternal truths does not mean that life is but a dream. If your ideas stink, reality will smack you up side your head. These are concrete, empirical realities, not metaphysical speculations about entities beyond our experience or the ultimate nature of the universe. It's about what's good and right and true, right now, in English, here on earth. 
We don't need to make any questionable metaphysical claims to assert that Robert Pirsig said this or thinks that. To pretend that we cannot cite the author for mystical reasons is just completely ridiculous. Something like six million copies of Zen and Art have been published so far. In what sense is that not real? In what sense are concepts not real?
See you're conflating the problem with the solution all the way across the board. The say that Pirsig has no inherent or independent existence is to reject a specific essentialist or Platonic conception of existence, but it is NOT a rejection of existence itself. C'mon, think about it. How would that work? The MOQ rejects the fixed and eternal and replaces that conception with one of process and evolution, a living, breathing reality. But you've taken this to mean that nothing is real. You've turned it into new-age nonsense that makes contact with concrete reality at no point. It's just nihilistic, free-floating, relativistic dream.
Yuk. No thanks.