[MD] The Quality of Free Will

[david buchanan]

Dan said:
He [Pirsig] says that James used the same words that Phaedrus used for the basic division of his metaphysics but I don't think he believes James is using the terms in the same way. ... He said the same words. Words can and do have different meanings and I don't see that James meant dynamic in the same sense that Robert Pirsig means Dynamic Quality. Can we at least agree on that?


dmb replied:
Seriously???! I baffled by your denial. As far as explicit textual evidence goes, this is as convincing as it gets and yet you seem to be denying for no particular reason. I don't get that.

Dan:

So I take that as a no. And I am not sure exactly what I'm denying.


dmb says:
Right, if you're saying that James and Pirsig don't mean the same thing, then we disagree and I think you are denying the claims that Pirsig makes at the end of chapter 29. That's the textual evidence I'm talking about. 

Dan said to dmb:
So you are saying that Dynamic Quality and experience as value and Quality as reality is and was common knowledge before Robert Pirsig wrote about it in ZMM and LILA... that he really isn't saying anything new at all... he is merely parroting what others have been saying for hundreds or even thousands of years. I have to say I am more than a bit disappointed in hearing this. Here I was thinking that he was an original thinker.

dmb says:
No, I wouldn't say Pirsig is an unoriginal parrot. As I see it, he discovered for himself the oldest truth in the world. "The physical order of the universe is also the moral order of the universe. RTA is both. This was exactly what the MOQ was claiming. It was not a new idea. It was the oldest idea known to man." (Lila, 382) The perennial philosophy is perennial, Pirsig says, because it happens to be true. In other words, people discover this same thing over and over again and if you look beyond the static fallout particular to each version or expression you can see that many people throughout history have "seen" the same truth. You can see it in Taoism, Buddhism, philosophical mysticism, religious mysticism, native American visions, etc..
"Mountains like these and travelers in the mountains and events that happen to them here are found not only in Zen literature but in the tales of every major religion. The allegory of a physical mountain for the spiritual one that stands between each soul and its goal is an easy and natural one to make. Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them,  being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships. Some travel into the mountains accompanied by experienced guides who know the best and least dangerous routes by which they arrive at their destination. Still others, inexperienced and untrusting, attempt to make their own rountes. Few of these are successful, by occasionally some, by sheer will and luck and grace, do make it. Once there they become more aware than any of the others that there's no single or fixed number of routes. There are as many routes as there are individual souls." (ZAMM, 187-8)



dmb said:
...They [Pirisg and James] both say subjects and objects are concepts rather than reality. They are both rejecting SOM and reformulating a static-dynamic metaphysics to replace it. I don't see any important difference. What difference do you see in their conclusions? Can you think of anything important or relevant that they disagree about?

Dan said:
I don't believe that I claimed they disagreed although I see you've excised my comment about James postulating that ideas arise from matter. So I take it you feel that is irrelevant. Honestly, I feel you are more the authority on James than I am or ever will be. If you feel he and RMP agree on everything, okay. But then, I am unsure why you're wasting your time on the MOQ.

dmb says:
Saying that James postulated matter as the basis of ideas isn't irrelevant but it also isn't correct. As we see in at the end of chapter 29, where Pirsig describes James's radical empiricism, that James saw mind and matter as secondary concepts which are derived from something more fundamental. And that something more fundamental is pure experience or pure Value. This is the "concrete" experience that you originally mistook for experience of material realities. You probably remember that you'd asked me where the will is and I answered with quotes wherein James says that the will is an idea based on this concrete experience, which is to say our notions of agency and passivity are derived from direct experience as it is felt and lived concretely. 

Also, I don't think the MOQ is diminished by the fact that it fundamentally agrees with the basic tenets that mystics have always held. Quite the opposite. Each version of this vision only illuminates and clarifies the others. They mutually support each other. James and Pirsig both make this vision fresh and alive in plain American english. That's priceless. 



Dan responded to a quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia:
It appears to me that James is intent on labeling what pure experience is, while RMP is intent on keeping it concept-free. But I am probably wrong about that too.



dmb says:
Yes, I believe that would be wrong. The Stanford article quotes the same piece of James that Pirsig does and this is the evidence against the contention that James didn't intend to keep pure experience free of concepts.  As the Stanford Encyclopedia article explains, "James's fundamental idea is that mind and matter are both aspects of, or structures formed from, a more fundamental stuff — pure experience — that is neither mental nor physical. Pure experience, James explains, is “the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories…" After Pirsig quotes James on that point, the very next paragraph is where he says that James had reduced this description to a single sentence wherein James uses exactly the same terms (dynamic and static) to describe the discrepancy between reality and concepts. The evidence is in Pirsig's book and the quotes from elsewhere only lend further support to the view that Pirsig's claims are valid. I mean, James wasn't even on my radar and my interest in him is motivated by Pirsig's claim to be a pragmatist and a radical empiricist. It seemed worthy of a more thorough investigation and the more I looked the more astonished I was at their similarities. It wasn't much different for Pirsig himself, who was prompted to look into James's work based on a review published by Harvard. The similarities between them would be totally unremarkable if Pirsig had simply adopted James's view but that's not how it went down. He discovered their sympatico only after the fact, after ZAMM had already been published. They arrived at the same conclusions independently and that, I think, is remarkable.