[MD] The reification issue completely misunderstood

[david buchanan]

Bo said to dmb:
So, it's my assertion that the MOQ's DQ/SQ is how reality is which is the grievance (and what reification means)? However it is was Phaedrus' mission to replace the S/O monster that has been (Western Culture's) scourge for so long and had kept us under its S/O spell and closed us off from the real objective experience. Sentenced us to eternal imprisonment within our subjective max-security jail.   And does DMB in ernest think that the MOQ is a mere reiteration of SOM? That its DQ/SQ arrangement is just another abstraction of concrete reality? Huh? Wasn't it Pirsig who set out to give the Western Culture reality back? ...[insults deleted]


dmb says:
Apologies to Horse for dragging Bo's words into this forum. The quote from Bo is such a neat piece of evidence that I couldn't resist. Sorry and I promise not to make a habit of it. 
MOQers, please notice that Bo really does not understand what reification means and instead of addressing the objection I've posed, he simply re-asserts the same error. The MOQ's static-Dynamic distinction is not just an abstract idea, it's how reality is, he says. If the DQ/sq split is just another abstraction, he says, then the MOQ is a mere reiteration of SOM. In several different ways, Bo quite adamantly asserts that the MOQ is the food and not the menu. This is what reification means. Of course this is exactly the opposite of what Pirsig actually says and so Bo has to insult the author, which I deleted, and dismiss his second book, which is the more philosophically serious book....

"The central reality of mysticism, the reality that Phaedrus had called "Quality" in his first book, is not a metaphysical chess piece. Quality doesn't have to be defined. You understand it without definition, ahead of definition. Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.     Quality is indivisible, undefinable and unknowable in the sense that there is a knower and a known, but a metaphysics can be none of these things. A metaphysics must be divisible, definable, and knowable, or there isn't any metaphysics. Since a metaphysics is essentially a kind of dialectical definition and since Quality is essentially outside definition, this means that a "Metaphysics of Quality" is essentially a contradiction in terms, a logical absurdity." (Pirsig in Lila)

"Subjects and objects are secondary.  THEY ARE 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."  In this basic flux of experience, the distinctions of reflective thought, such as those between consciousness and content, subject and object, mind and matter, have not yet emerged in the forms which we make them." (Pirsig in Lila)
"There must always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing." (Pirsig in Lila)

dmb continues:
At the risk of insulting your intelligence, in Pirsig's restaurant analogy the metaphysical menu stands for static concepts and dynamic reality itself is the food. Bo is eating the menu. That's what reification means. And yet Marsha says she hates reification and loves Bo. It doesn't take a certified public accountant to see how that doesn't add up. Like any other conceptual arrangement, metaphysics must be full of defined terms, conceptual distinctions and intellectual abstractions. But that's exactly what dynamic reality is not. The distinctions we make are conceptual and that fact applies to the conceptual distinctions Pirsig made in constructing the MOQ. Why wouldn't it? The MOQ is supposed to be a better set of concepts and not least of all because it makes concepts subservient to the dynamic reality from which they emerge, but it is still a huge mistake to confuse reality with our names for reality, our defined metaphysical concepts about reality. 
The point of the mystic's objection to metaphysics is to say that dynamic reality itself can only be known only non-conceptually. And the point of the pragmatic theory of truth is to say there is no single exclusive truth that matches the way reality really is. The MOQ is one of many pictures that hang in the gallery of truth, like any other conceptual arrangement. In fact, it is SOM that says otherwise, that does insist on a single true abstraction portrait...

"Unlike subject-object metaphysics the Metaphysics of Quality does not insist on a single exclusive truth. If subjects and objects are held to be the ultimate reality then we're permitted only one construction of things - that which corresponds to the 'objective' world - and all other constructions are unreal. But if Quality or excellence is seen as the ultimate reality then it becomes possible for more than one set of truths to exist. Then one doesn't seek the absolute Truth.' One seeks instead the highest quality intellectual explanation of things with the knowledge that if the past is any guide to the future this explanation must be taken provisionally; as useful until something better comes along. One can then examine intellectual realities the same way one examines paintings in an art gallery, not with an effort to find out which one is the 'real' painting, but simply to enjoy and keep those that are of value. There are many sets of intellectual reality in existence and we can perceive some to have more quality than others, but that we do so is, in part, the result of ourhistory and current patterns of values." (Pirsig in Lila)