[MD] Definitions.

[MarshaV]

Hi dmb,

On Feb 14, 2013, at 12:57 PM, david buchanan <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:

> 
> Ian said to ARLO:
> Constraining - not necessarily - not constraining "within" any boundaries. A pedant can choose to work within dictionary definitions of the words used and the formal syntax of the sentences composed - but any good writer / communicator - like Pirsig does NOT do this.
> 
> 
> Arlo replied:
> Really? How did you understand a single word in his books? Seems to me that he "relied" a great deal on shared definitions and syntax (can you point out ONE sentence in his books that did not follow a culturally-shared syntax?). "Dictionary definitions", by the way, is a ridiculous straw man (and I'm a little surprised you use this). Of course the "meanings" of individual "words" (and the shared use syntax) evolve over time, who has ever suggested otherwise? The point is not that such-and-such a word is forever etched in iron, but that we can never "think" outside "language", any more than we can "breathe" in a "vacuum" (aka, "our intellectual description of nature is ALWAYS culturally defined" [emphasis added]). (By the way, if you respond to this by implying I deny a pre-intellectual experience or pre-language awareness, I will reach through the nether and slap you. ;-))
> 
> 
> 
> Ian replied to Arlo's reply:
> Dictionary definition - just two word short-hand for your 10 line paragraph ... but yes OK.  So ... that evolution involves people using the language beyond existing understood explicit meanings - implying, glimpsing, evoking alternative possibilities.  Obviously anyone (me included) "starts" from existing understood definitions - but they're enabling tools as you said - we don't "end" with that, only a pedant involved in some tight logical construction is constrained by those.
> 
> 
> dmb says:
> I'm totally with Arlo on this. I think it's safe to say that Pirsig, the rhetorician, definitely cares about words and he uses the language with great skill. He's an artist and words are his medium of choice. Even further, we can see that this concern for language reflected in the content of his thought - most conspicuously in his defense of the Sophists and his a attack on the dialecticians. And in the second book he frames thought and language in terms of social and intellectual static quality.
> 
> "Definitions are the FOUNDATION of reason. You can't reason without them." (Emphasis is Pirsig's. ZAMM, page 214.)
> 
> "A metaphysics must be divisible, definable and knowable, or there isn't any metaphysics." (Pirsig in Lila, page 64.)

Yes, but the above sentence does not state that Dynamic Quality is divisible, definable and knowable.  And RMP also wrote this:

" ... Strictly speaking, the creation of any metaphysics is an immoral act since it's a lower form of evolution, intellect, trying to devour a higher mystic one. The same thing that's wrong with philosophology when it tries to control and devour philosophy is wrong with metaphysics when it tries to devour the world intellectually. It attempts to capture the Dynamic within a static pattern. But it never does. You never get it right. 

So why try? It's like trying to construct a perfect unassailable chess game. No matter how smart you are you're never going to play a game that is 'right' for all people at all times, everywhere. Answers to ten questions led to a hundred more and answers to those led to a thousand more. Not only would he never get it right; the longer he worked on it the wronger it would probably get. . . . ".  

           (RMP, LILA,  Chapter 32)


Marsha:
Can you explain what the higher, mystic form might be?  


Thanks,

Marsha 




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