[MD] Metaphysics and the mystic.

[david buchanan]

dmb said:
The MOQ is a matter of bringing DQ, the primary reality, down to the the level of secondary abstractions and derived concepts. ...there is nothing inherently degenerate about intellectual patterns of quality. The problem arises when we abuse the abstracting function, when we make ideas more real or more important than the reality they come from. This is, strictly speaking, a matter of breaking the highest moral code. 

Mark replied:
I am not sure how you are using the term degenerate here.  For if something degenerates it reverts back to DQ.  I also would not say that DQ is primary. ...


dmb says:
Well, Pirsig does say that DQ is primary. He calls it "the primary empirical reality", for example. 
The concept of degeneracy, in this case, is a matter of trying to make DQ (the primary empirical reality) fit into concepts. In one passage, Pirsig describes this as a container problem. Which is bigger than the other? Which could fit inside the other? Can all ideas fit inside of empirical reality? Sure, why not? Can all of empirical reality fit inside ideas? No, of course not. That's why DQ can't be defined. It's like trying to put the sky in a shoebox. 

RMP:"Some of the most honored philosophers in history have been mystics: Plotinus, Swedenborg, Loyola, Shankaracharya and many others. They share a common belief that the fundamental nature of reality [DQ] is outside language [sq]; that language splits things up into parts while the true nature of reality is undivided. Zen, which is a mystic religion, argues that the illusion of dividedness can be overcome by meditation."

RMP:"Historically mystics have claimed that for a true understanding of reality metaphysics is too "scientific." Metaphysics is not reality. Metaphysics is names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand page menu and no food.   ....Mystics will tell you that once you've opened the door to metaphysics you can say good-bye to any genuine understanding of reality. Thought is not a path to reality. It sets obstacles in that path because when you try to use thought to approach something that is prior to thought your thinking does not carry you toward that something. It carries you away from it. To define something is to subordinate it to a tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you do that you destroy real understanding."