[MD] The hard question.

[david buchanan]

Marsha said:
The distinction is rhetorical, not absolute.

dmb says:
The distinction is intellectual and Pirsig makes that intellectual choice as a philosopher. We're talking about the MOQ, the conceptual distinctions within Pirsig's philosophy. Denying that this distinction is absolute doesn't make any sense because nobody said it's absolute. So your point is pointless and weasely. 


Marsha said:

"It’s fairly obvious from reading Pirsig’s texts that SOM is perceived by him as an example of ignorant thinking. Briefly, this is due to such systems ignoring the reality of Dynamic Quality. Why this is particularly ignorant is explained by the ‘Three Aspects’ of the Cittamatra school of Mahayana Buddhism.  Williams (1988, p.83) states that the First Aspect refers to the falsifying activity of language which implies independent and permanent existence to things.
> >> As Hagen 202 (1997, p.30) notes, one of the most fundamental truths noted by the Buddha is that all aspects of our experience are in constant flux and change. According to the Buddha, when a person ignores this truth they subject themselves to dukkha." (McWatts, MoQ Textbook)

Marsha:
It is because of the quote's beginning "the falsifying activity of language which implies independent and permanent existence to things" that the importance of the fundamental nature of experience being "constant flux and change" should be stressed.



dmb says:
Here you have the same problem of conflating DQ and sq but then there is also another confusion being added on top of the first one. The criticism against the "falsifying activity of language which tends to give independent and permanent existence to things" is appropriate when directed against SOM or some other reified concepts BUT you are using this criticism against the MOQ's intellectual distinctions, which are NOT reified concepts at all and certainly not reified subjects and objects. The MOQ says that subjects and objects and all other ontological categories are just secondary concepts, not the starting points of reality, not the structure of reality. They are static patterns derived from directly experienced reality or DQ. That's what Pirsig and James mean by saying "subjects and objects are secondary and conceptual", as opposed to reality itself. 

"Subjects and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something more fundamental which he described as 'the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories. In this basic flux of experience [DQ] the distinctions of reflective thought [sq], such as those between consciousness and content, subject and object, mind and matter have not yet emerged in the forms [sq] which we make them. Pure experience cannot be called either physical or psychical. It logically proceeds this distinction."

Likewise, "metaphysics" is a knowable, definable set of concepts and NOT reality itself. These secondary concepts or static patterns cannot be undefinable and unknowable, obviously, unless the goal is unintelligible babbling. 

"Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions. Quality is indivisible, undefinable and unknowable in the sense that there is a knower and a known, but a metaphysics can be none of these things. A metaphysics must be divisible, definable and knowable, or there isn't any metaphysics."

But you are MISUSING the argument against reified concepts, wherein concepts (like SOM) are mistaken for independent and primary realities. You're using that argument against Pirsig's concepts, which are not reified, which are taken as permanent or independent or primary realities. By using that argument against the MOQ's conceptual distinctions, against any concept, including Pirsig's replacement for SOM's reified concepts. This is the often repeated complaint of confusing the patient (intellect) with the disease (reified intellect). 

In short, you're reading all the evidence through this same mistake. You put this mistake on everything you read, regardless of whether it's Pirsig, McWatt, Hagen, James or anyone else. There are more layers to this mess but conflating the central terms and confusing the sickness with the cure are both epic blunders and together it's quite a giant mess. 



"In the past Pheadrus' own radical bias caused him to think of Dynamic Quality alone and neglect static patterns of quality. Until now he had always felt that these static patterns were dead. They have no love. They offer no promise of anything. To succumb to them is to succumb to death, since that which does not change cannot live. But now he was beginning to see that this radical bias weakened his own case. Life cannot exist on Dynamic Quality alone. It has no staying power. To cling to Dynamic Quality is to cling to chaos. He saw that much can be learned about Dynamic Quality by studying what it is not rather that futilely trying to define what it is... Slowly at first, and then with increasing awareness that he was going in a right direction, Phaedrus' central attention turned away from any further explanation of Dynamic Quality and turned to the static patterns themselves" (Robert Pirsig in Lila). 
"Static quality patterns are dead when they are exclusive, when they demand blind obedience and suppress Dynamic change. But static patterns, nevertheless, provide a necessary stabilizing force to protect Dynamic progress from degeneration. Although Dynamic Quality, the Quality of freedom, creates this world in which we live, these patterns of static quality, the quality of order, preserve our world. Neither static nor Dynamic Quality can survive without the other."




"When A.N.Whitehead wrote that 'mankind is driven forward by dim apprehensions of things too obscure for its existing language' he was writing about Dynamic Quality. Dynamic Quality is the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality, the source of all things, completely simple and always new. it was the moral force that had motivated the brujo in Zuni. Itcontains no pattern of fixed rewards and punishments. Its only perceived good is freedom and its only perceived evil is static quality itself - any pattern of one-sided fixed values that tries to contain and kill the ongoing free force of life."