[MD] Intellectual Discussion and Dialectic - Finding agreement, Quality and beauty in the world.

[david buchanan]

dmb said:
According to SOM, intellect and values are two different things - and that is the problem with SOM. The MOQ, by CONTRAST, is what you get with the formal recognition of Quality in the operations of intellect AND the MOQ says that intellectual truths are the most evolved, most dynamic and most moral kind of static value. It is a species of the good, subordinate only to DQ itself.    ...My complaints about the incoherence of "ever-changing static patterns" are NOT based on the belief that logic is supreme or that definitions give us the essential truth of reality, of course. They are based on the totally uncontroversial "belief" that incoherence in thought and speech is bad. How is that even debatable? Of course it's no good to be logically inconsistent. What could be more obvious? If intellect is an art form, then using the key philosophical terms in a contradictory way will mark you as a hack, as a very bad artist. It's like the would-be novelist who doesn't understand drama or grammar. There's not much chance they're gonna produce anything artful.


David Harding replied:
Right. But what is intellectual consistency? That is - being consistent with experience.  What is experience but a bunch of values?  Someone doesn't expound things thinking they're being inconsistent.  They'll expound things based on the values which they hold. If you see a contradiction in what someone writes and they don't acknowledge it or do not see value in that contradiction then there is a *reason* why.  That *reason* is what's important.  You could go blue in the face saying how inconsistent someone is but if they do not value the distinctions which are created and to which you are explaining they are being inconsistent about then nothing will change.  The important thing isn't the inconsistency - but the values of the participants of the discussion. [...] Most unsolved disagreements between two people are a result of not of bad logic (though it certainly plays a role) but a difference of values.  The values are the important thing - not the logic behind the thinking.  The one informs the other.  Unless you can show someone something better - then nothing will change…  There's a reason why folks might sometimes appear to refuse to see what you do… Why is that?  That's the most important question...



dmb says:
Seems to me that this is quite wrong and it is a result of the same contradiction I've been complaining about all along. It re-introduces a value-free intellect and then pits that against the MOQ's values. It equates the MOQ's intellectual level with SOM, which the MOQ opposes and rejects. You keep breezing right past this point, David. Intellectual values are values. Truth is a species of the good. SOM is NOT equal to intellect but Marsha thinks it is and that is why she rejects it. The result of her contradictory error (ever-changing static patterns) is to reject intellectual values, to reject the MOQ's highest level of static morality. I can't know what it is that Marsha does value or hold dear but anyone can see that she is full of contempt when it comes to studying other philosophers, contemptuous of academia, of textual evidence, of logical consistency and she even has a dismissive attitude to dictionaries and encyclopedia. You know, words are cages, kill all intellectual patterns, metaphysics is inherently immoral, etc., etc..

Why does Marsha have such a contemptuous attitude toward intellectual values? I don't know. Sour grapes, I guess. It takes all kinds to make the world go around and nobody is required to join a philosophical discussion group. Marsha can be an anti-intellectual, new-age flake if she wants to. She can join a neo-Nazi gun club or run away with circus but why in the world would she want participate in an intellectual discussion? If she really thinks metaphysics is immoral, why is she here? If morality is served by killing all intellectual patterns, then why not join a monastery and take a vow of silence? Is it really important that we understand WHY she is intellectually nowhere? Isn't it enough to know THAT she does not see intellectual value? I think so, and that much has been amply demonstrated. Like the title character that she bizarrely admires, she's just oblivious to that kind of quality. A person like that simply has no business being in a place like this. 

The basic problem is a lack of clarity as to what Pirsig is actually rejecting. If Pirsig is rejecting SOM for the purpose of improving and expanding rationality itself, then obviously it's going to create quite a mess to equate SOM with rationality itself. When you do that, as Marsha has done (as well as Bo, Platt and whoever else has been infected with this nonsense), the problem is conflated with the solution. The cure becomes indistinguishable from the disease. Pirsig's criticisms of SOM are then misinterpreted as criticisms of the MOQ's intellectual level. The result is a total disaster, one that totally undermines Pirsig's work and undermines this forum's main purpose. 


It's not just wrong, it's aggressively and obnoxiously wrong. It's self-indulgent, attention-seeking, egotistical bullshit. She. Does. Not. Care about this kind of work, probably because she's incapable of doing it. Like I said, it's probably a sour grapes kind of thing. 

Wikipedia on "Sour grapes":
"The phrase sour grapes is an expression originating from "The Fox and the Grapes," one of Aesop's Fables. It refers to pretending not to care for something one wants, but does not or cannot have."