[MD] "...writing metaphysics..."

[david buchanan]

David Harding said:

...If we do not use conventions and rules everything becomes chaotic and meaningless.   We need static quality to create a fixed situation whereby we can communicate and build quality. On this forum - the static quality which we build quality on is RMP's two books - ZMM and Lila.   If we cannot discuss the content of those two books then we might as well be talking gibberish because we're never going to have any static quality we can build upon.  This is the beauty of static quality.  It creates a situation where DQ can flourish.

"But the answer to all this, he thought, was that a ruthless, doctrinaire avoidance of degeneracy is a degeneracy of another sort. That's the degeneracy fanatics are made of. Purity, identified, ceases to be purity. Objections to pollution are a form of pollution. The only person who doesn't pollute the mystic reality of the world with fixed metaphysical meanings is a person who hasn't yet been born — and to whose birth no thought has been given. The rest of us have to settle for being something less pure. Getting drunk and picking up bar-ladies and writing metaphysics is a part of life."



dmb says:
Yes, thank you, that's what I've been trying to say. 

I suppose Pirsig's comments might be misunderestimated here because casual tone. He certainly wants to give the impression, I think, that writing metaphysics is no big deal. It's right in there with wine, women and song and otherwise portrayed as something anybody might do as a normal part of life.

But please notice how strongly he asserts his assertion; the ONLY person who doesn't do metaphysics, he says, is the person who hasn't been born. Nobody doesn't do it. Nobody, Pirsig says. "As long as you're inside a logical, coherent universe of thought you can't escape metaphysics." The only question is whether or not it's actually logical, coherent, agrees with experience and otherwise works to make sense of things.

If we add this assertion that it's an unavoidable part of life to Pirsig's assertions about the self, I think we get a clear picture of what it means to say reality is value all the way through. 

"If you compare the levels of static patterns that compose a human being to the ecology of a forest," the each of us becomes "a complex ecology of patterns moving toward Dynamic Quality" Like the title character, Lila, we are "composed of static patterns of value and these patterns are evolving toward a Dynamic Quality". 'All life is a migration of static patterns of quality toward Dynamic Quality." 

We are composed of static patterns and the whole world of understanding is built of static patterns. We can't avoid the universe of meaning, the universe of values because that's the only reality we get and that's what we are. Once you're born, that's it, you're always, already in a world of meanings, concerns, values, projects. You can't escape from this. And freedom is found by trying to escape from this static world of understanding.  Freeing one's self of static pattens does not make one a free thinker. It just makes one an insufferable air-head.