[MD] The Hero's journey

[david buchanan]

dmb said:
...the MOQ is a rival set of glasses, one that's meant to replace SOM because of the way it largely ignores and excludes DQ. The problem (SOM) is being out of touch with DQ and the MOQ is the solution to that problem.


Matt replied:
Okay, but what do you do with what I think is a correct perception of Pirsig that Pirsig also wants to say that we are never disconnected from DQ?  You elaborated well the one side of Pirsig that suggests that SOM is in an important sense between us and DQ (via the glasses analogy), but what do you do with the notion that one of Pirsig's first metaphysical moves is to collapse the (SOM) distinction between experience and reality, in order to say that we are never, actually, out of touch with reality, even if we had thought we were (again, via the glasses analogy--reality was always there, even if we thought it was blue, and not the better color, green). Isn't there a sense in which Pirsig is suggesting that SOM's problems are fake, illusions, rice-traps we stumbled into?  Or is that one of the things you count as a misinterpretation?



dmb says:

I think there is a subtle confusion about SOM here. Roughly speaking, SOM is like hypochondria. It's a real problem precisely because it produces so many fake problems - particularly an artificial conception of the relations between appearance and reality, between knower and known. But it's not that we just stumbled into stupidity for no particular reason. The problem is obsolescence, but it's important to remember that those SOM concepts were formed on the basis of Quality too. The concepts of SOM and scientific materialism were formed in response to empirical reality too and they have been fabulously successful. But evolution marches on and what was once expansive and liberating and novel is eventually outgrown and becomes constricting and oppressive and stale. Once upon a time, when the laws of the jungle were more of a threat to civilization and rationality, wild nature was just outside the gates and it made a heck of a lot of sense to quell the "passions".

But the beauty that turned on Poincare was not beastly. The MOQ's expansion of rationality says, among other things, that mathematics, geometry and other intellectual pursuits are not and should not be thought of as value-free. They artistic creations that serve human purposes, they have their own aesthetic charms and we follow them with a different sort of passion. As James says, we really ought to admit that feelings play a role in the construction and adoption of our philosophies. This is not about being ruled by sentimentality or whatever, but acknowledging the fact that people have an affective response to the various world views, ideologies and philosophies. We "kindle or shudder" at these visions long before we can say why and this has a huge impact on what we think and say. We feel it before we can think it through. Poincare had his flash of insight first and then he did the math. But of course he had to do tons and tons of work just to understand the problem he was up against, just to HAVE the problem.

The endless landscape analogy offers another way to think about this. The surrounding landscape is the totality of experience, even the aspects you don't deliberately notice or attend to. The handful of sand has been taken from the larger landscape so it's not out of touch with reality is some ontological sense, as if you and your handful are no longer within the landscape. But if this handful of sand represents SOM, then you have a handful of that's been sorted in such a way as to construe the handful as all of reality. SOM's so-called objective reality is within that handful of sorted sand. SOM's objective reality a concept about reality that comes from something more fundamental, that is derived from the primary empirical reality . You could say that this reification problem tells the wearer of SOM glasses that his glasses ARE reality rather than a set of evolved concepts or a pile of analogies.