[MD] Awareness and consciousness in the MOQ

[Ant McWatt]

David Harding responded to Andre's post of April 3rd:

> David to Andre:
> In Lila, Pirsig decides to define that thing which ought to be left
> undefined and he did this by placing the 'undefined' quality aside in a
> definition of DQ.
>
> Andre:
> Hi David, just nit picking here. Pirsig did, of course not 'define' DQ as you appear to say above; he made it a 'referring term' thereby leaving 'it' undefined.

Ant McWatt comments:

To really nitpick, Pirsig considers his two books - taken together - as a "definition" of Quality; the first concentrating on Dynamic Quality, the second book focusing on the static quality patterns.

In reference  to David Harding's point (elsewhere) that a referring term is a definition, I suppose a referring term is a definition of sorts but the term "Dynamic Quality" is meant to be a pointer towards the indefinable part of the Quality Event  rather than a definition where you're describing the different parts of something and their relations to each other.  It also depends on how you are defining definition.  To throw in a bit of G.E. Moore:

'When we say, as
Webster says, The definition of horse is A hoofed quadruped of the genus
Equus, we may, in fact, mean three different things. 

(1) We may mean
merely When I say horse, you are to understand that I am talking about
a hoofed quadruped of the genus Equus. This might be called the arbitrary
verbal definition: and I do not mean that good is indefinable in that sense. 

(2)
We may mean, as Webster ought to mean: When most English people say
horse, they mean a hoofed quadruped of the genus Equus. This may be
called the verbal definition proper, and I do not say that good is indefinable
in this sense either; for it is certainly possible to discover how people use a
word: otherwise, we could never have known that good may be translated by
gut in German and by bon in French.


But (3) we may, when we define horse, mean something much more important. We may
mean that a certain object, which we all of us know, is composed in a certain
manner: that it has four legs, a head, a heart, a liver, etc., etc., all of them
arranged in definite relations to one another. It is in this sense that I deny
good to be definable. I say that it is not composed of any parts, which we can
substitute for it in our minds when we are thinking of it. We might think just
as clearly and correctly about a horse, if we thought of all its parts and their
arrangement instead of thinking of the whole: we could, I say, think how a horse
differed from a donkey just as well, just as truly, in this way, as now we do,
only not so easily; but there is nothing whatsoever which we could substitute for
good; and that is what I mean, when I say that good is indefinable.'

(G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica, 1903, Chapter 1)

Possibly, the term "Dynamic Quality" can be considered (2) a "verbal definition proper" (because it is possible to discover how people use the term) while the MOQ (as explained by Pirsig's two books) is a type of (3) a definition of the Good as defined by Moore's third definition of definition! 


----------CUT---------

> David Harding:
> Further to your point about MOQ's Quality being the same as other stuff - I think we can draw these comparisons and claim they all really mean the same thing, but what value is there in doing so? Northrop and James and Zen Buddhism and Christianity all screw up what the other person is trying to say.
>
> Andre:
> I disagree here David. A careful reading of Northrop (which, to me is like climbing Mount Everest on bare feet and without an oxygen mask) and Pirsig (and for that matter the perennial philosophies of both East and West) shows that awareness of the 'common ground' we walk on is obscured by all these different analogies upon analogies. I think the value lies in exactly that: we hussle and bustle and fight and disagree and kill because of the analogies the different cultures have abstracted and in the process seem to have forgotten that to which they all point: Quality.

Ant McWatt comments:

Andre, I love that analogy about Northrop with climbing Everest though his anthropological/sociological accounts (as found in "the Meeting of East and West") aren't really that heavy reading.  It's when he starts on all the different types of concepts by intuition and postulation (such as concepts by inspection), that my eyes start glazing over. 

Otherwise, this is a good thread.  I've enjoyed reading all the contributions so far from yourself and the two Davids.

Best wishes,

Ant




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