[MD] The Tao of Quality - Verse 1

[david buchanan]

Krimel said to Ron:
I had hoped to be more clear in pointing out that the function of reason is to provide checks and balances on our fundamentally irrational nature. As you point out the Greeks were early adopters of reason as technique. They are inventors of the distinction between the rational and irrational. Rational has its roots in mathematical ratio which is to say it is digital and algorithmic. They abhorred the irrational, that is, numbers that cannot be expressed in terms of ratio.

dmb says:
One of the problems with SOM is the way it dismisses and ignores the "irrational" but by "irrational" Pirsig did not mean "irrational numbers". He's talking about things like the occult, art, morality, mysticism and the like. The traditional SOM empiricists, wiht the positivists being the most severe example of this old-school empiricism, considered all that sort of thing to be scientifically and philosophically meaningless. These are the irrational elements that were left out in the cold and were "crying out for assimilation". 

"The Metaphysics of Quality subscribes to what is called empiricism. It claims that all legitimate human knowledge arises from the senses or by thinking about what the senses provide. Most empiricists deny the validity of any knowledge gained through imagination, authority, tradition, or purely theoretical reasoning. They regard fields such as art, morality, religion, and metaphysics as unverifiable.  The Metaphysics of Quality varies from this by saying that the values of art and morality and even religious mysticism are verifiable, and that in the past they have been excluded for metaphysical reasons, not empirical reasons. They have been excluded because of the metaphysical assumption that all the universe is composed of subjects and objects and anything that can't be classified as a subject or an object isn't real. There is no empirical evidence for this assumption at all. It is just an assumption." (RMP, 'LILA')

James was quite interested in assimilating the same sorts of "irrational" elements, as we see most famously in his Varieties of Religious Experience. There is also a long-lost series of lectures that James had given on "Exceptional Mental States" in 1896. The story of their re-discovery is pretty interesting, I think. 

Eugene Taylor was only 66 years of age when he passed away on January 30th, 2013. Saybrook University was his academic base but he was also a research historian of psychology at Harvard Medical School, founder of the Cambridge Institute of Psychology and Religion, and an internationally renowned scholar on the work of William James. In a recent obituary of sorts, in Psychology Today, they say, “Only Eugene Taylor could write about William James and the Spiritual Origins of Pragmatism” He was an expert on everything William James, a leading figure in the existential and humanist psychology world, and part of the Eastern/Buddhist tradition of spirituality. To make a long story short, Taylor rediscovered, reconstructed, and then re-delivered that long-lost series of lectures that James had given in 1896. Taylor put it all in a book titled, "William James on Exceptional Mental States: The 1896 Lowell Lectures". That is why Psychology Today called him “the reincarnation of William James.”
James was making the transition from psychology to philosophy when he originally delivered those talks, and so they provide a clearer picture of that crucial transitional phase in James’s intellectual life. Taylor discovered an important "missing link" in the evolution of James’s thought. And what he was doing was trying to assimilate our "irrational" experiences. 

 
Krimel said:
...But it is important to note that reason as a form of thinking is not strictly speaking a function of speaking. Rather it is the result of writing. To speak is to sing. And this singing retains essential analog features that are smoothed out and lost in writing. While not the first digital people, the Greek elevated and expanded the digitization of mankind.


dmb says:
I take your point. Socrates was horrified by the fancy new technology that was emerging in his time; the written word. But your use of the analog vs digital metaphor is rather unfortunate simply because Pirsig uses the metaphors so differently from you and separately from each other. He uses a software-hardware metaphor in Lila to talk about the distinction between levels of static patterns but his "analogues" analogy does some very important work in ZAMM - and I'm afraid your usages of it might confuse things.

He uses "analogies" to describe the world as we understand it, to describe the conceptual world, to describe all the static patterns we use to make sense of experience. As he explained it to the faculty in Bozeman more than fifty years ago....

"In our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to our environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues. We invent earth and heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language, philosophy, engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues reality. And they are reality. We mesmerize our children in the name of truth into knowing that they are reality. We throw anyone who does not accept these analogues into an insane asylum. But that which causes us to invent the analogues is Quality. Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it."

To understand the world as an inherited pile of analogies is to understand that we created this world, that we carved it out, that it is far more plastic and malleable than the realists can imagine. When the oceans, earth, and sky are understood as analogies, as concepts, then the world of understanding looses its foundational status, its ontological primacy and is instead seen as an elaborate set of human concepts.

The explanation to the faculty in Bozeman (who tended to think in behaviorist terms and so that's how Pirsig is explaining) is prior to the scenes in the Chicago classroom, where Phaedrus says, "Of course it's an analogy. Everything is an analogy. But the dialecticians don't know that."  His reply to the Chairman ("This entire description is just an analogy.") connects quite neatly with his earlier explanation of the world as "an invention" made up of "many marvelous analogues". And maybe it goes without saying but the scope and reach of this claim is consistent, simple, and clear. In Bozeman he says, "All of it. Every last bit of it." And in Chicago he says, "Everything is an analogy." This is what I mean when I say that MOQ is a giant anti-reification program. None of this can be said about DQ itself. The concepts and ideas that make up the MOQ are all analogies, just like everything else, but the primary empirical reality itself is not an analogy, but rather the source of all analogues, of all static patterns. It's the source and substance of every analogy.