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

[david buchanan]

dmb said:

..."If your values are better than mine, why is that?" This implies that the meaning of logical consistency differs from person to person, that the distinction between coherence and incoherence is just a matter of one's personal feelings and attitudes. It just doesn't work like that, David. It's not as if each individual has their own private mythos or that each person is a culture of one, an isolated individual with no real way to communicate with another soul, excepts as two ships passing the night. That kind of solipsistic alienation is what you get with SOM, wherein each individual has her own way of representing reality. But in the MOQ, we are composed of the static patterns of our time and culture and language. Marsha is not from some other place or time. She speaks English (sort of) and lives in the 21st century West, just like everybody else here. 



David replied:
The 'meaning' of logical consistency or coherence doesn't have to differ between person to person for folks to still disagree about what has high or low logical consistency and high or low coherence.  Everyone knows what's good. Everyone knows what's logically consistent or has coherence.  We just disagree about our words which describe that good… Coherence and incoherence isn't a matter of personal feelings.  Quality is universal.  Our different interpretations of Quality vary between person to person however - depending on our life experience.  So along this line of thought - Marsha *is* a culture of one just like everyone else...


"'You're sort of another culture,' he said. 'A culture of one. A culture is an evolved static pattern of quality capable of Dynamic change. That's what you are. That's the best definition of you that's ever been invented.
'You may think everything you say and everything you think is just you but actually the language you use and the values you have are the result of thousands of years of cultural evolution. It's all in a kind of debris of pieces that seem unrelated but are actually part of a huge fabric. Levi-Strauss postulates that a culture can only be understood by reenacting its thought processes with the debris of its interaction with other cultures. Does this make sense? I'd like to record the debris of your own memory and try to reconstruct things with it… That's what I think can be done with a single person. I can take parts of your language and your values and trace them to old patterns that were laid down centuries ago and are what make you what you are.'"


dmb says:
The quote is evidence for MY point, actually. And it's quite fitting that he's talking about Lila, the title character, who interprets the Captain's questions and inquiries as a personal attack. She evades the questions and then simply refuses to answer at all. I'm nobody, she says, you can't get to me. Of course this is because she is intellectually nowhere. She just cannot rightly read the situation. He's trying to help her but she's afraid him and doesn't understand him, assumes he just like all the others who used her and discarded her. She's sick and the diagnosis is made by examining her static patterns and lack thereof. In any case, the quote certainly makes the same point that I did. Where Pirsig says, "the language you use and the values you have are the result of thousands of years of cultural evolution," I had said, "we are composed of the static patterns of our time and culture and language". Like the title, Marsha doesn't get to have her own private version of intellectual values. She sees the value or she doesn't and it's quite obvious that she doesn't.

 If Marsha doesn't care about truth and thinks philosophizing is inherently immoral, I think it's going to be pretty much impossible to show Marsha that logical consistency, the proper use of terms, coherence, clarity, economy, evidence, elegance, etc.. are better than logical inconsistency, the misuse of terms, incoherence, irrelevance, verbosity, selective reading, and clumsiness. If she doesn't care about such things, the only means of persuasion are ruled out before you can even begin to try. She just can't appreciate what's happening, what's being said or why it is being said. That's why she doesn't belong here and never says anything worth hearing. It's just interference. It's just noise. She's just a parrot - doesn't even understand the meaning of the words she uses and yet those words are played over and over like a broken record. It's like the Groundhog Day of philosophy; a nightmarish loop where you have to go through the same damn thing every day, month and month, year after year. After a while you have to start to wonder about her mental health. Some learning curves are shallower than others, but jeez... 

David H said:
... Talking to her about her logic isn't going to change things because she has made value judgements *before* that logic which deem the logic unnecessary. 


dmb says:
That's exactly why Marsha should not be part of this discussion group. Her anti-intellectualism is NOT our problem. It's her problem, her deficit. If she hates water, then she should hang out at some place OTHER the swim club. Isn't totally obvious that this is just not the right place for people with attitudes and values like hers? Doesn't the MOQ tell us that it is immoral to let social values dominate intellectual values? That's what she's doing, at best.


David H said:
But on a broader point -  this isn't just true of Marsha and her lack of value for logic.  But true of all discussions - even ones which we may claim involve 'pure logic'.  All intellectual logic comes from the values of the culture and the people expounding that logic. Unless we can not only show folks how wrong they are - but think about why they might be wrong and explain how something else might be better - then nothing will change.  Well that's what I think anyway...

dmb says:
Nobody is talking about "pure logic" and it's awfully tiresome to keep repeating this point. Nobody thinks logic is supreme and the MOQ does NOT abandon logic. Logic has BECOME an issue because of Marsha's actual and particular assertion of illogic. Same with definitions. They became an issue because of Marsha's actual and particular misuse of the MOQ's key terms and concepts. And of course these are intimately related because the logical inconsistency and her contradictory use of the terms is one and the same thing. To say that static patterns are ever-changing IS an illogical misuse of the terms, which I've explained many times. She has proven to be totally impervious to any kind of persuasion - dictionaries, encyclopedia, philosophers, academic professional and of course an avalanche of textual evidence from Pirsig's writings. She has amply demonstrated that is incapable of finding value in any of it.


David H said to dmb:

Intellectual quality in the MOQ is indeed the greatest static good. I agree with that. But I think a large part of why Marsha does not always seem interested in intellectual quality is because she deems Dynamic Quality as the better value.  She isn't some crazy person - she's using the structure of the MOQ in her thinking.  And I'm sure for every Marsha on this discussion board there's millions of folks on the planet just like her who would make the same mistake given the structure of the MOQ.  We both know that a discussion about philosophy ought to begin by acknowledging this degeneracy of ruining the undefined nature of DQ.  And we also both know that a good Mystic would avoid this degeneracy by acknowledging the *static* existence of *static* quality and not by muddying the reality of both DQ and sq. But so long as Marsha is a member of this forum and until Marsha sees the quality of a better perspective - nothing will change and we will be stuck with a lack of clarity on this forum about this.



dmb says:
No, she's misusing and misconstruing the basic structure of the MOQ and it might not be crazy, although I certainly have my suspicions about that, but it certainly is incorrect and, frankly, it's downright stupid. 
The whole point of Pirsig work is to integrate intellect and values. That's how rationality is expanded and improved. In the MOQ, there is a formal recognition of Quality within the operations of intellect. The intellectual level of values is protected by the code of art, which protects intellectual evolution, and it is protected from degeneracy by the next highest moral code. This is what Marsha is constantly trashing, insulting and misconstruing. Pirsig has re-constructed things so that intellectual is no longer that lifeless voice of reason, no longer meaningless, or hollow or amoral. This is a matter of confusing the problem (Objectivity) with the solution (MOQ). Marsha has warped the MOQ so as to turn it into its own worst enemy. 

And so, of course, I've spent some time and energy trying to show exactly how and why her assertions are nonsense. Why? Because I quite like Pirsig's work and I feel compelled to protect it from such abuse. Marsha is probably a hopeless case but reasonable people are persuaded by reason. It never happens instantly, not even with well-informed and sincere conversationalists - but honest, reasonable people will eventually change their minds and/or grow intellectually. Total incorrigibility is simply unacceptable in a place like this; we're not just talking about a frustratingly shallow learning, where you get held back to repeat the grade, but a completely flat line. It exactly the same error, phrased exactly the same way, regardless of anything that happens between each posting. 

Funny how her performance of this never-changing static pattern is directly contradicted by claim made within it. It's contradictory nonsense on so many levels, and that's just one of the problems with the often repeated salad of words. 

You're welcome.