[MD] Replacing SOM

[David Morey]

Hi Krimel

You are quite right about Heidegger's rejection of SOM long before
Pirsig, and in many ways I see the glory of Pirsig to be the parallel
development of an alternative to SOM that has much in common
with Heidegger, and in a clearer and more approachable language
than the one developed by Heidegger. There are much greater
riches in Heidegger's thought that have been explored in hundreds
of books by hundreds of different academics. However Heidegger is
rather lofty and is not very interested in the positive sciences, whereas
in my mind, one of the great things about Pirsig is his discussion of
static qualities. Roy Bhaskar criticises Heidegger about this failure
to engage with the positive sciences and addresses this in his Realist
Theory of Science, without losing the recognition of openness that
Heidegger sees as Dasein (being-the-open), and what Pirsig calls DQ.

So for me Pirsig's great promise is to couple static and dynamic aspects
as poles of the unity of experience he calls quality. Directly experiencing
the static qualities of our experience mean that we can recognise positive
qualities of sameness and regularity in our experience, that it is possible
to do science and be realists about the regularities that we experience,
that is clearly dominated by change and flux but nonetheless contains
island of regularity and sameness that can be built on, analysed,
conceptualised, and used to make sense of our experiences and
to reach some level of human understanding of our experiences.
If it was all DQ without SQ there could be no way to make sense of
our experiences and no way that there could be any cosmos evolving
through order and chaos to make the levels of SQ exist and move the
openness of DQ along and upwards with the levels of SQ. For is not
DQ all about the quality of values, so that DQ evolves along with SQ,
so that the values of particles, atoms, molecules, amoeba, plants,
animals and finally humans, all based on increasingly complex
levels of SQ and increasingly complex and felt levels of dynamic
quality. Or to use an old alchemical metaphor the cosmic tree keeps
growing and at every branching point burns the flame of DQ. To my
mind DQ is a flame that burns everywhere at every level, exploring
the openness of possibility, possibility that emerges and becomes
more complex as it builds up levels of order/SQ. In this sense DQ
changes in character, the dynamic unfolding of possibility in more
complex and changes in nature as it emerges at different levels.

In other words quality and the quality of experience evolves up the
levels, so the quality experience of stones is simpler and less
interesting than that of plants or animal or humans who enjoy
a level of static and dynamic qualities that we usually refer to with
the word 'consciousness' but in MOQ terms is realised via 4 levels
of SQ and the sort of DQ that human beings are able to experience
(as opposed to what rocks experience).

Whitehead is also a key thinker who has set out another impressive
alternative to SOM, the best book on this I have read is easily this one:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Whiteheads-Radically-Postmodern-Philosophy-ebook/dp/B003HC7TXY/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1362691555&sr=8-3

Again there are many parallels to Pirsig and Heidegger.

All the best
David M





-----Original Message----- 

From: Krimel
Sent: Wednesday, March 06, 2013 5:30 PM
To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
Subject: [MD] Replacing SOM

dmb says:
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. "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]
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.
I still find Heidegger a bit daunting but he is very clear that his aim is
to upend SOM and he owes a large if seldom acknowledged debt to Lao Tzu.
Heidegger's solution is to claim that "being" never exists in isolation. It
is always an irreducible monism: "being in the world." He also is at pains
to avoid anthropomorphism by setting humans aside as Dasein, the kind being
that takes a stand on its own being. That is, a being who rather than
deriving meaning from some cosmic absolute, creates purposes and projects of
its own. Heidegger is also clear that his objection is not to this single
dualism but dualisms in general.
Without butchering him further, I think is safe to say Heidegger's influence
has been immense and anyone serious about philosophy in the early 1990's
ought to have been aware of this. So if Pirsig's sole aim was to replace one
dualism with another, it would be both philosophical muddled and in this
particular instance redundant.
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. It is hardly
shocking that such an idea was been so widely ignored. If you two are right,
it would be as though Pirsig had developed a metaphysics that is content to
bite off less than it can chew. It would be among the first philosophies to
fail because it aims too low.
I prefer to think that Pirsig indeed aims higher. He 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. This
was the thrust of Heidegger's various assaults on binaries and reveals his
debt to Lao Tzu. Binaries are not mutual exclusivities, they are spectra,
horizons, fields of probability, aspects that are revealed through the
tension that arises between them.
But if you insist on clinging to this notion of the MoQ as a dualism, I
challenge either of you are anyone else to provide examples of DQless SQ or
SQless DQ. Show us all, please, one without the other?

But frankly, I think your problem is much worse that even this. As I said
earlier you seem hell-bent on nursing to life shadows of Nietzsche's "divine
rot." You are a living example of what Nietzsche calls "reactive nihilism."
Faced with the bitter truth that all absolutes, foundations and grounds for
belief are human creations that anthropomorphize nature to make us feel
secure, you retreat into denial and attempt to create some new absolute to
substitute for the old. This was in fact Nietzsche's chief objection to the
science of the mid-1800's. It had degenerated into an attempt to replace
Divine Law with Laws of Nature. 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, "the overall character of the world is, for all eternity,
chaos, not in the sense that it lacks necessity, but rather in the sense
that it lacks order, articulation , form , beauty , wisdom , and whatever
else our aesthetic anthropomorphisms might say."


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