[MD] humpty dumpty

[david buchanan]

 Ron wrote:
"Now if MoQ is an extension of Pragmatism and also an extension of Buddhism (an American form) forwarded as such by Ant, then it stands to reason that both Pragmatism and Bhuddism share an inclination toward belief. Interesting. Too bad this was missed."


Dan replied:
It could well by that Pragmatism leans toward belief but Buddhism does not. It leans away from belief and instead says we must approach the world through pure experience, unfiltered by beliefs and assumptions. I offered a quote from Steve Hagen to back this up. And this is also where the MOQ says that value arises as well. Robert Pirsig clearly states that thinking will not bring us closer to reality. It leads us away from it. 

dmb says:
Yea, one scholar was even bold enough to claim that the original Buddha himself was a pragmatist and a radical empiricist. I think a MOQer can understand what this means without reading James, Dewey, Hagen, Wallace or anyone else because Pirsig's MOQ is a form of pragmatism and radical empiricism too. To get at what this means, I think, is to sort out the relation between concepts and reality, between beliefs and experience. It's not a matter of rejecting or endorsing ideas and concepts as such but rather a matter of whether or not they are given priority over experience. In Pirsig's case, he describes this relationship in terms of what's primary and what's secondary. For all our pragmatists and radical empiricists, concepts are always secondary and experience itself is the primary empirical reality. Experience itself is reality and our ideas and concepts only have meaning and truth in relation to that primary reality. That's what Pirsig means by saying that thought can't bring you closer to reality. That statement, among other things, is a rejection of a long rationalist tradition - going all the way back to Plato and Socrates - which prioritizes logic and definitions over empirical reality. In ZAMM this attack on the Platonic tradition is dramatized as a defense of the Sophist's long-lost cause, as a re-assertion of artful rhetoric over logical rigor or precise verbal formulas. I mean, Pirsig is quite consistent through both books on this point.

Let's not forget to remember how anti-intellectual Pirsig in NOT. The whole point of the MOQ, as Paul Turner explained so well, is to expand and improve rationality. The aim is a root expansion of rationality. As Pirsig puts it, "the thing to be analyzed, is not Quality, but those peculiar habits of thought called 'squareness' that sometimes prevent us from seeing it. ..The subject for analysis, the patient on the table, was no longer Quality, but analysis itself. Quality was healthy and in good shape. Analysis, however, seemed to have something wrong with it that prevented it from seeing the obvious." (ZAMM 218-9) 
Pirsig says his central aim is to show how "rationality can be tremendously improved, expanded and made far more effective through a formal recognition of Quality in its operation." (ZAMM 278) That's where "direct experience" or "the primary empirical reality" comes in as a priority over concepts and ideas. It's not just a new philosophy, he says, it's "even broader than that - new form of spiritual RATIONALITY". (ZAMM 358, emphasis is Pirsig's) "He did nothing for Quality or the Tao. What benefited was reason." (ZAMM 257)

"Reason and Quality had become separated and in conflict with each other" (ZAMM 358) back in the days of Plato. "It's been necessary since before the time of Socrates to reject the passions, the emotions, in order to free the rational mind for an understanding of nature's order", Pirsig says, but now it's time for "reassimilating those passions which were originally fled from. The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man's consciousness, are a part of nature's order too. The central part." (ZAMM 294)

In Lila, then we find the nuts and bolts version of what it means to subordinate reason to Quality instead of the other way around. "Truth is a species of the good," James and Pirsig say together, quite pragmatically. They both want thought to serve life and not the other way around. Our ideas are derived from the immediate flux of life and they are useful and true only to the extent that they are successfully "set to work within the ongoing stream of experience", as James puts it. And if our philosophies are going to be the servants of life, then what hope is there unless we're willing to "admit that all our philosophies are hypotheses, to which all our faculties, emotional as well as logical help us, and the truest of which will at the final integration of things be found in possession of the men whose faculties on the whole had the best divining power?"

This re-prioritization is also expressed in terms of Dynamic experience as distinguished from static concepts by both Pirsig and James. You've seen this quote many times; " 'There must always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing.' Here James had chosen exactly the same words Phaedrus had used for the basic subdivision of the Metaphysics of Quality." (Lila, 365)

The quote you posted, Dan, comes from the same page and it makes this same point. "... Value, the pragmatic test of truth, is also the primary empirical experience. The Metaphysics of Quality says pure experience is value. ... Value is not at the tail-end of a series of superficial scientific deductions that puts it somewhere in a mysterious undetermined location in the cortex of the brain. Value is at the very front of the empirical procession." (Lila 365)

My hunch, Dan, is that you've followed Marsha's line of thinking and ended up with an excessively anti-intellectual position as a result. I'm not a mind-reader, of course, but I think it's quite clear that a bogus anti-intellectualism is her central mistake, from which many other mistakes flow. For whatever it's worth, I really think that reading her posts are a waste of time and you ought not take her views seriously. She'll only lead you down some dark alley or dead end. Here brand of vacuous nihilism is very un-Pirsigian, I think, and it's not very Buddhist either.