[MD] The Hero's journey

[david buchanan]

Marsha said to dmb,

Would you please present your definition of relativism?


dmb says:
You're changing the subject and asking me to give an answer that's already been given several times. It's in the archives, I'm sure. You could find it by searching the quotes, which I've already responded to several times.

Here's the idea in a nutshell. Relativism is the view that truth is relative to the culture or the individual, that there is no way to say that one truth is better than another. This is the kind of relativism we saw in Franz Boas. It is a result of scientific objectivity, which says that morals and values are just arbitrary social constructions. The MOQ says that some truths are better than others, that these harmonious reasonings are formed on the basis of quality and they can be judged on the basis of coherence, logical consistency and agreement with experience. 


Pirsig's intellectual autobiography begins when he's just a teenager, when he's tortured over the endless proliferation of hypotheses. Science was supposed to get you closer to the truth, he naively thought. But he discovered that science was going in the opposite direction. There were an infinite number of explanations for any given data set, so how do you know which one is right? That's the context in which Poincare's insights came as such a relief. He could see that Quality is what takes the arbitrariness and capriciousness out of it. 

"Poincaré's contemporaries .. presumed that "preselected facts" meant that truth is "whatever you like" and called his ideas conventionalism.  ..What he neglected to say was that the selection of facts before you "observe" them is "whatever you like" only in a dualistic, subject-object metaphysical system! When Quality enters the picture as a third metaphysical entity, the preselection of facts is no longer arbitrary. The preselection of facts is not based on subjective, capricious "whatever you like" but on Quality, which is reality itself. ...we know from Phædrus' metaphysics that the harmony Poincaré talked about is not subjective. It is the source of subjects and objects and exists in an anterior relationship to them. It is not capricious, it is the force that opposes capriciousness; the ordering principle of all scientific and mathematical thought which destroys capriciousness, and without which no scientific thought can proceed."


We see the same idea in Lila, at the end of chapter 29, wherein Pirsig says that Quality is at the "cutting edge of scientific progress itself". All our concepts (analogues, ghosts, static patterns) were formed on the basis of Quality. People and ideas and cultures grow and change in response to Quality or, to put it another way, evolution is guided the track of Quality so that arbitrary and capricious truths don't long survive.