[MD] The Tao of Quality - Verse 1

[David Morey]

Hi Krim/DMB

Yes concepts and thinking are based on analogies, but analogies of what?
Where do analogies start, how do they get going? Do we not discover
regularities in experience before concepts? Regularities like hot? Is not
hotness a form of quality, a static quality we understand long before
-as a species- we get to language and concepts. And long before we
get to analogies about really 'hot' looking girls? You know whatever
happened to those hot stove static qualities of value?

All the best
David M

-----Original Message----- 
From: david buchanan
Sent: Friday, March 08, 2013 7:23 PM
To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
Subject: Re: [MD] The Tao of Quality - Verse 1


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.



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