[MD] Taking off the glasses?

[david buchanan]

Wiki says, "Reification (also known as concretism, or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness) is a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it were a concrete, real event, or physical entity.[1] In other words, it is the error of treating as a "real thing" something which is not a real thing, but merely an idea. For example: if the phrase "fighting for justice" is taken literally, justice would be reified."

In the MOQ, "subjects" and "objects" are probably the most important examples of concepts that are commonly reified. In Pirsig's books, gravity, substance and causation are also exposed as concepts rather than concrete realities. We get this in the ghost stories in ZAMM and in more explicitly philosophical language in Lila. One of the aims of the MOQ, I think, is to treat all concepts as secondary additions and this one is of the main reasons to maintain a distinction between concepts and the primary empirical reality from which they are derived.

At the end of chapter 29 in Lila, Pirsig says, quoting William James,...
" 'There must always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing' Here James had chosen exactly the same words Phaedrus had used for the basic subdivision of the Metaphysics of Quality."

This "discrepancy" also goes along quite coherently with the mystic's contention that the fundamental nature of reality is outside of language and with Pirsig's description of DQ as pre-intellectual experience. The intellect, words and concepts all work to chop things into bits, to carve out all kinds of differences, to define and measure. But the fundamental reality is undivided or continuous or undifferentiated, depending on which philosopher-mystic is talking. Pirsig calls DQ the "primary empirical reality" and the "pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality" even way back in ZAMM. He heard it from Northrop way back when he was a kid in the Army and then again from James after he wrote ZAMM. I mean, there is more than one way to get a handle on this fundamental discrepancy and it goes a very long way as an antidote to reification. It's quite sweeping in that effect. It slams the brakes on that kind of fallacy.