[MD] Idealistic static value patterns

[Matt Kundert]

Hi Tuukka,

Matt said:
To the operative claim in your philosophical criticism of Pirsig's MoQ, 
however, I think you make a mistake.  You say, "Their [the static 
patterns system laid out by Pirsig] primary disadvantage is, that they 
are a variant of emergent physicalism, because the bottom pattern, 
from which other patterns emerge, is inorganic. This isn't a 
disadvantage in itself. It's a disadvantage because Pirsig didn't 
develop a parallel system of patterns that would be idealistic."  You 
make "disadvantage" more specific by saying it is the "assumption 
that existence is fundamentally inorganic."

I think it is a mistake to understand Pirsig as suggesting "physical 
existence as a fundamental ontological category."  Pirsig's first 
metaphysical move is to make Quality the fundament of reality.  On 
my reading, that exactly makes normativity the fundamental 
constitutive category that undergirds all further modes of 
understanding existence.  To my mind, Pirsig exactly agrees with you 
as you move to extrapolate a more fine-grained analysis of levels.  
(Dan Glover, in a conversation we've been carrying on for near two 
months, has in fact called this Pirsig's idealism.  I tend to agree with 
this sense of idealism as normativity.)

Tuukka said:
I was not referring to inorganic quality as the fundamental ontological 
category of the MOQ. To be sure, everything in MOQ is "Quality". But 
in and of itself, that is not an informative metaphysical statement. It 
is only informative as a statement on what context are we thinking in. ...

But when we are already in the context of MOQ, saying that 
something is Quality doesn't mean much. Because in this context, 
everything is by definition already Quality.

Matt:
If I followed your critical argument correctly, then you were 
suggesting that Pirsig needed to "develop a parallel system of 
patterns that would be idealistic" to offset his isolated attention to the 
classic picture of the universe furnished by an ascending line from 
physics to evolutionary biology to X (a placeholder for whatever it is 
that furnishes a picture of the social and intellectual).

I think that is, more or less, right.  Pirsig was lopsided in this respect, 
because what he needs alongside a picture of the universe that 
develops from the Big Bang to life on Earth in the Year of Our Lord 
Savior Jesus Christ 2011 (a "variant of emergent physicalism") is a 
picture of the development of those vocabularies that allow us to 
state that picture (a "parallel system of patterns that would be 
idealistic").  This would be the balancing of, as Dan might put it, 
materialism and idealism.  (And so people don't become confused, 
these are special uses of "materialism" and especially "idealism," 
but I think we need a special sense of "idealism" to try and come to 
grips with Pirsig's notion of the idea, or intellectual pattern, coming 
before matter.)

However, that being said, my point in suggesting that your criticism of 
Pirsig is defused by Pirsig because, in the MoQ, it is a mistake to say 
that an "assumption that existence is fundamentally inorganic" is at 
work, is that I think you are wrong to think that "saying that 
something is Quality doesn't mean much" in the MoQ.  True, it 
doesn't explain anything about the patterns themselves when we 
reach that level, but it precisely causes the assumption you stated to 
be invalid _because it is_ "an informative metaphysical statement" by 
telling us "what context we are thinking in."  That context, as I put it, 
is the context in which everything is already understood to be 
normative, and so follow the rules of the normative.

The _implications_ of that metaphysical stance, I think, are left 
underdeveloped (or at least, there is a lot of room for further growth 
in understanding how deep that stance penetrates and what 
implications it should and should not cause to our thinking).  One 
implication is a balance between two systems, as you put it.  But 
Pirsig 1) does provide the conceptual resources for understanding 
this to be the case and 2) does show cognizance of the need for the 
two systems by virtue of the other philosophical work he performs in 
ZMM and Lila.  ZMM, after all, is the genealogical unearthing of the 
line of thought on the _idealist_ side of the equation that produces 
SOM's _reductive_ emergent physicalism.  This is paralleled in Lila 
by his discourse, for example, on anthropology.  The true 
lopsidedness of Pirsig's extant philosophical work, perhaps, is that on 
the idealist side, the side that deals with the history of humanity's 
attempts to develop ideas, it is mostly _deconstructive_, whereas on 
the materialist side, the side that deals with the nature of reality, it is 
both deconstructive and constructive (the deconstructive bits are his 
arguments against taking certain philosophical positions and the 
constructive bits are his metaphysical system-building).

The special senses of "idealism" and "materialism" should be more 
fully apparent now.  For if one uses a typical definition, it does 
appear that I've just suggested that the system of the Metaphysics of 
Quality, the "side that deals with the nature of reality," is materialist.  
But that's not the conceptual position of "materialism": so defined 
here, _every_ philosophical system should, for comprehensiveness, 
have an idealist side and a materialist side, and the materialist side 
defines the _material_ of reality.  Descartes has two, res cogitans 
and res extensa (mind and matter).  Pirsig has one: Quality.  The 
material of reality in the MoQ is Quality, which means that it is 
normative, which means that it blocks attempts to reduce the 
normative to the non-normative ("reductive emergent physicalism") 
by finding underneath _everything_ the normative.  _What this 
means_ needs to be further explained, yes; but the conceptual 
apparatus is already in place to block the inference that the MoQ 
assumes that "existence is fundamentally inorganic."

Tuukka said:
Despite this, inorganic quality is not the fundamental ontological 
category of the MOQ, because static quality is more fundamental than 
inorganic quality. Inorganic quality is only the fundamental ontological 
category of Pirsig's theory of static value patterns. That theory is only 
a part of the MOQ, but right now, that was the part I was examining.

Matt:
I think you should beware the use of "fundamental" in these contexts.  
For in the context of Pirsig's theory of static patterns of value, the 
import of "fundamental ontological category" is completely different 
than it was when you used the phrase at the level "of the MoQ."  At 
the level of the MoQ, Quality is "fundamental" because it is 
_conceptually_ prior (one might have expected "experientially," but 
I'm speaking about the systematic arrangement of the concepts in 
the metaphysics, not the reason for why Quality is, after all, 
conceptually prior).  At the level of the theory of static patterns, 
however, inorganic is "fundamental" because it is _temporally_ prior.  
It is unclear to me what the difficulty with inorganic being at the 
bottom is, though you insist that that is the level you were actually 
making your criticism at.  Pirsig is a Darwinian naturalist in terms of 
the rejection of God-terms to be used to explain the spatial-temporal 
manifestation of existence.  That means that while he finds the 
normative underneath all, it doesn't mean, I take it, that normativity 
explains why the Big did Bang.

Matt