[MD] humpty dumpty

[118]

Hi dmb,
You misunderstood my question.  I will be more specific.  Why does Pirsig choose the scientific levels of inorganic, biological, social, and intellectual in order to create a metaphysics based on Quality?  I know what they are, I am a scientist.  Why does Pirsig find this particular method of sorting helpful?

Once you have suggested an answer for that, I will ask why does Pirsig choose Static and Dynamic Quality for which to construct a metaphysics based on Quality.

You are wrong, Quality is not a thing, not even "the source of all things".  I thought we had got beyond that.  MOQ is a description of Quality, it is not the metaphysics of turtles.

I am trying to ask some fundamental questions here.  I was hoping you had dealt with them in your thesis.  If not at least you can speculate based on your understanding of Quality.  Maybe Pirsig explained this more directly than in Lila.

He could have made other choices through which to present Quality.  Has there been any discussion on that?  Once one has a grasp of Quality, other analogies can work.  If this has not yet been discussed perhaps we can do so here.  Other forms of metaphysics use other types of levels, as you know.

Thanks,


Mark

On Aug 3, 2012, at 10:59 AM, david buchanan <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:

> 
> Mark asked:
> Why does Pirsig think it is important to bring in a social level when creating a metaphysics based on Quality? Is there an alternative approach that would deliver the same message about Quality?
> 
> dmb says:
> The MOQ's social level is one of four different kinds of STATIC quality and all four levels are to be distinguished from Quality or Dynamic Quality. There are important reasons for distinguishing the social level from the other levels of static quality, but DQ is not relevant to those reasons. For this reason, your question doesn't make any sense. 
> Pirsig helpfully says that the four levels of static quality is his way of dividing everything that we know, a way of sorting everything that one would find in the most thorough encyclopedia. The ONLY thing that's NOT included in these four levels is Quality itself. Unlike all the other things in this encyclopedia, Quality can't be defined and in fact it is the source of all those static patterns, the mother of all static patterns, if you will. Again, for this reason, your questions make no sense. 
> I suspect you're suffering from a profound misconception with respect to the static/Dynamic split, the distinctions and relations between the static and the Dynamic. But the reasons for distinguishing the social level from both the biological and intellectual levels are perfectly intelligible on a more common sense level and can be discussed without bringing in any mysticism or reference to Dynamic Quality. Creating the levels is just a matter of picking the right spot among the knowable and definable things and then drawing the lines between them.
> The line between the biological and the is super easy common sense. Social patterns are not "physical" but animal bodies are. It's as simple as that. The distinction between the social and intellectual levels has perplexed more people than any other - at least in this forum - but that distinction had already been made in ancient Greece (the mythos and the logos) and I wish the perplexed would just go off and educate themselves. Pirsig provides a metric ton of examples from history and politics that clearly demonstrates the distinction in real world terms. If the meaning of these plentiful examples is lost on the perplexed, I wish they would just go off and educate themselves on history and politics too. 
> Most of them complain that it's Pirsig fault for not being clear enough. That's outrageously arrogant and ignorant at the same time. (If you're feeling angry right now, dear reader, even your physical being knows that I'm talking about you.) If I seem to have a short fuse when it comes to these sorts of questions, it's for these reasons. 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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