[MD] Replacing SOM

[david buchanan]

dmb said to Krimel:

Ahh, so you admit that you don't see the difference between SOM and the MOQ and you don't see the MOQ as a replacement for SOM. And, quite oddly, you think that rejecting SOM is converting the MOQ back into SOM. [Krimel had said,] "When you say that the MoQ is meant to replace SOM, you convert the MoQ back into SOM."     Hmmm, you'd definitely have to do some explaining for that make any sense. How does that work, exactly? Seems logically impossible to me but if you think you can make a case for that, knock yourself out.  


Krimel replied:
I did not say there is not difference between the two as ideas but functionally they equivalent. You seem to advocate merely replacing one dualism for another. This is just shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic. You simply exchange SOM platypi with MoQ platypi. As you formulate it, the MoQ is little more than a bathhouse for platypi. If the sole aim of the MoQ were to present a coherent argument against SOM, Pirsig was at least 60 years too late. Heidegger pounded it into the ground somewhere around 1930 and it was the principle reason for his falling out with his teacher Husserl, who remained a Cartesian to his dying day. ....

dmb says:
Well, if nothing else, at least you're right about Husserl's Cartesianism. 
I don't know how to respond to the "platypi" complaint without some kind of specifics. It's so vague that I really don't know what you're talking or referring to. about. Those lines sound kinda cool but they need some actual content, you know? (sigh)

Actually, James had taken a stance against the Cartesian self and against subject-object metaphysics by 1905. Pirsig didn't know that when he made his claim about being the first, although I think he does qualify that with "as far as I know" or some such thing, and he acknowledges that Hegel had kinda, sorta talked about overcoming that dualism too.

But WHAT I REALLY WANT TO ADDRESS is the idea (?) that the MOQ and SOM are "functionally equivalent" (whatever that means?) and the idea (?) that replacing the SOM with the MOQ is "merely replacing one dualism with another".  I can't precisely discern what you think the problem is but I can tell that you don't appreciate or even understand what this shift means. And yet you dispute it. Hmmm,  that's a weird combination, one that puts a strain on your credibility.  

And I don't think you addressed my ONLY question either. How does the rejection of SOM lead to the acceptance of SOM? How is that even logically possible? Also, I'm a big fan of Heidegger but how is he relevant here, exactly? How is his supposed rejection of dualisms in general bare on the issue? Are we not talking about the MOQ as a replacement for SOM? And what the means, exactly? Are we talking about what Pirsig does and does not mean to say, or what? C'mon, Krimel. Quit with the smokescreens. I'm not impressed. Quite the opposite. 

"After many months of thinking about it, he was left with a reward of two terms: Dynamic good and static good, which became the basic division of his emerging MOQ.   It certainly felt right. Not subjects and objects but static and Dynamic is the basic divison of reality." 



"Dynamic good and static good ..became the basic division of his emerging MOQ. ...Not subjects and objects but static and Dynamic is the basic divison of reality."


"Not subjects and objects but static and Dynamic is the basic divison of reality."




Krimel said:
...You and Arlo seem to be advancing the idea that the MOQ is designed as mere substitution of a bad thing for a slightly less bad thing. ...He [Pirsig] understands that it is not this dualism, SOM, that is THE problem anymore than is the romantic/classic dualism of ZMM. Both are wrong because in each, one pole sees the other as in opposition rather than as in tension with itself. ...But if you insist on clinging to this notion of the MoQ as a dualism, I challenge either of you or anyone else to provide examples of DQless SQ or SQless DQ. Show us all, please, one without the other?

dmb says:
You're being quite vague and sloppy here, Krimel, and that's even after I tried to clean it up a bit. Yikes.
The MOQ's static-Dynamic is a dualism, but in a different sense and at a different level. Under SOM, subjects and objects are considered to be the basic stuff of reality, are conceived as two distinctly different kinds of substance, as two distinctly different ontological realities, as the starting points of reality. On that basic ontological level, the MOQ is a monism, not a dualism. The static-Dynamic dualism of the MOQ is conceptual. It is the first slice made with that analytic knife. It's also worth pointing out, I think, that the MOQ only rejects that ontological version of subject-object dualism. In the MOQ, as I like to say, the status of subjects and objects in vastly reduced in rank so that they are recognized as secondary concepts, as the basic conceptual categories into which we sort experience, as opposed to the ontological starting points of reality, as opposed to primary realities. In the MOQ, by contrast, the primary reality is purely empirical. The metaphysics of substance is just gone and replaced by an experiential monism. This is what James was talking about in "A World of Pure Experience". In the MOQ, experience (DQ) is the primary reality.  As Pirsig says, "DQ and experience become synonymous." In ZAMM he says, "Quality is the source and substance of everything" and in Lila he says, "Dynamic Quality is the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality, the source of all things."  In that sense, on that level, the MOQ is a monism. It is a dualism because of that basic subdivision, although half of that dualism remains undefined pure experience. And the static, definable half of this dualism is further subdivided into four levels, and the five moral codes. In that sense, and with respect to its theory of truth, the MOQ is a pluralistic philosophy. These labels don't have to be mutually exclusive, especially since they label different features of the total system. I mean, it's not like the MOQ has more than one primary reality, and the first cut creates just one basic subdivision and the further division of the static side doesn't contradict either of those moves in any way. As far as I can see, anyway. 
This is a very radical move, by the way. Something slightly less bad? Oh dude, when William James did this in 1905, Bertrand Russell said James "shook the world". Pirsig calls it a Copernican revolution. It's a "Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy". Your characterizations of mere dualism swapping and slight improvements are very much at odds with the general consensus and that's one of the things that  leads me to believe that don't really appreciate what it means to reject SOM.


Krimel said to dmb:
...you retreat into denial and attempt to create some new absolute to substitute for the old. ...I prefer to think of your kind of reactive nihilism as a lust for "top down" thinking. It is the grasping for some transcendent principle that guides and breathes spirit into the universe. It is a form of pathological denial in the face of the realization that as Nietzsche puts it, ....




dmb says:
Sigh. This straw man is so old and so boring.

As I've said repeatedly, I'm only talking about Pirsig's books. I just want to be clear about what he means. I don't about reality. I'm not making any claims about the ultimate truth of anything. It just about the meaning of words and ideas as they're presented in published works. As I understand those books, in fact, there is no such thing as an absolute or a transcendent principle. Man is a participant in the creation of all things, Pirsig says. James says the human serpent in coiled over everything that we carve out everything. And you think I'm into them because they help me deny this? That's exactly wrong. That's what I'm trying to tell YOU about subject and objects. They are concepts we add, not primary realities. We carved them out. We created them in response to DQ.


Will you pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaase stop with the stupid straw men? Why not simply repeat the comments you wish to contest and respond to things that people actually say? That's only fair and decent, right? Otherwise, it's a waste of time and energy and this place. Why dispute something nobody said? What's the point of that, other than distortion and deception? Seriously. It's distracting and it's bullshit.