[MD] Taking off the glasses?

[david buchanan]

dmb said to Steve:
Saying things and having the glasses off are two different things. You keep asking about the "crazy things said by someone with the glasses off" and I keep telling you that saying things means you don't have the glasses off anymore. As soon as you start talking you've got the glasses on.


Steve replied:
Pirsig shoulod have been careful to make that distinction, but unfortunately that is not what Pirsig says. Pirsig says that when the people who "still have their glasses on" hear the statements of the one who has taken off his glasses, the ones who "still" have their glasses on "regard his statements as somewhat weird." ..I see him as having slipped up here. You, it would seem, would prefer to look the other way. Fine. Whatever. 



dmb says to Steve and Matt:
No, I'm saying there is no need to look the other way. You're are objecting to the idea that someone could take off the interpretive glasses and offer an interpretation at the same time, which would contradict MOQ's basic architecture. The MOQ itself is a static interpretation that does, in fact, make many "crazy sounding" statements about experience without the glasses. The MOQ itself is an example of "statements of the one who has taken off his glasses". 

I think you are ignoring the substance of his remarks, pretending that he doesn't have a hell of a lot to say about the connections between DQ, insanity and enlightenment and you're adding simultaneity to Pirsig's comments in order to manufacture a "slip up" where there really isn't one. I think you're objection is fake and petty. 

The point of that passage is that the MOQ is an intellectual interpretation that may sound a bit crazy to common sense ears precisely because it is built around DQ or uninterpreted experience. Philosophical mysticism sounds weird at first, he's saying, but the MOQ actually passes the standard test of truth, including logical consistency and agreement with experience. 

Pirsig is a philosophical mystic who makes all kinds of statements about the mystical reality, the primary empirical reality he had called "Quality" in his first book. You and Matt repeatedly treat Pirsig's statements as if he were an analytic philosopher and repeatedly take Pirsig's reality to be a version of the very things he rejects, namely Plato's fixed Ideas or the objective, non-human, external reality. 


Context is very important. The passage is all about the difference between two rival sets of glasses; SOM and the MOQ.

"The idea that the world is composed of nothing but moral value sounds impossible at first. Only objects are supposed to be real. 'Quality' is supposed to be just a vague fringe word that tells what we think about objects. The whole idea that Quality can create objects seems very wrong. But we see subjects and objects as reality for the same reason we see the world right-side up although the lenses of our eyes actually present it to our brains upside down. We get so used to certain patterns of interpretation we forget the patterns are there.
...The same is true of subjects and objects. The culture in which we live hands us a set of intellectual glasses to interpret experience with, and the concept of the primacy of subjects and objects is built right into these glasses. 

...This may sound as though a purpose of the Metaphysics of Quality is to trash all subject-object thought but that's not true. 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. ...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 our history and current patterns of values. ...The Metaphysics of Quality provides a better set of coordinates with which to interpret the world than does subject-object metaphysics because it is more inclusive. It explains more of the world and it explains it better. The Metaphysics of Quality can explain subject-object relationships beautifully but, as Phaedrus had seen in anthropology, a subject-object metaphysics can't explain values worth a damn. It has always been a mess of unconvincing psychological gibberish when it tries to explain values."