[MD] The Tao of Quality - Verse 1

[david buchanan]

Dan said to Krimel:
..Using the term 'experience' in that manner indicates there are patterns waiting to be experienced. But according to the MOQ, experience is primary while patterns are secondary. They arise from experience. I explained this in a prior email to you but reading your reply it seemed pretty obvious I was wasting my time.


Krimel replied:
The statement "Biological patterns are experienced irrationally. They are unnamed" contains no reference to temporal order.  ...Any sort of patterning is experienced irrationally but only becomes objectionable in the MoQ sense when named. I thought that was clear in what I said. It seems that you are making a big deal out of the naming problem which is part of what I have been trying to address here of late.


dmb says:
I understand Dan's criticism. If memory serves, such statements (from Krimel) are what prompted the same criticism from me. It's also clear to me that Krimel does not understand this criticism. That's why Dan feels that he's been wasting his time, I think, because Krimel doesn't even see what the problem is. On one level the problem is just a matter of misusing Pirsig's terms but the particular way Krimel misuses them has the effect of converting the MOQ back into SOM. The logical error is just a matter of using Pirsig's term is a contradictory way but these contractions are a result of Krimel trying to understand the MOQ in term of SOM's basic metaphysical assumptions. Dan's complaint - that Krimel's use of the terms indicates that patterns are waiting to be experienced - points at that retention of SOM. Those assumptions are not explicitly stated in Krimel's problematic sentence but that's what we mean by basic "assumptions". They are just assumed and otherwise go without saying. In this kind of situation, of course, this is definitely important stuff that should not go without saying. 

Pirsig does make it all quite explicit, of course, precisely because the examination of these assumptions is so central in the shift from SOM to the MOQ. The MOQ's key terms cannot rightly be understood if they are conceived in terms of SOM and that's exactly where Krimel goes wrong here: "Biological patterns are experienced irrationally. They are unnamed." This statement uses the MOQ's terms but it turns their meaning upside down. Krimel says that patterns are experienced before they are named but Pirsig is saying that patterns ARE names and names ARE patterns and they are CONTRASTED with pre-conceptual experience or pre-intellectual experience (or what Krimel is calling "irrational" experience, I guess). 

To support that contention, dmb quotes Pirsig:
"Quality is shapeless, formless, indescribable. To see shapes and forms is to intellectualize. Quality is independent of any such shapes and forms. The names, the shapes and forms we give Quality depend only partly on the Quality. They also depend partly on the a priori images we have accumulated in our memory. We constantly seek to find, in the Quality event, analogues to our previous experiences. If we didn't we'd be unable to act. We build up our language in terms of these analogues. We build up our whole culture in terms of these analogues. . ."

"The MOQ says that Quality comes first, which produces ideas, which produce what we know as matter.  The scientific community that has produced Complementarity almost invariably presumes that matter comes first and produces ideas.  However, as if to further the confusion, the MOQ says that the idea that matter comes first is a high quality idea!" [LILA'S CHILD, Annotation 67]

"The Metaphysics of Quality itself is static and should be separated from the Dynamic Quality it talks about. Like the rest of the printed philosophic tradition it doesn't change from day to day, although the world it talks about does."


This is what James's radical empiricism and we can see this even if we stick to the primary texts, in this case the end of chapter 29 in Lila. 

"The second of James' two main systems of philosophy, which he said was independent of pragmatism, was his radical empiricism.  By this he meant that subjects and objects are not the starting points of experience. Subjects and objects are secondary.  They are concepts derived from something more fundamental which he described as "the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories."  In this basic flux of experience, the distinctions of reflective thought, such as those between consciousness and content, subject and object, mind and matter, have not yet emerged in the forms which we make them.  Pure experience cannot be called either physical or psychical: it logically precedes this distinction."

As Krimel's sentence construes it, biological patterns are conceived as a some kind of living object about which we don't yet have any names or ideas. But James and Pirsig are not only saying something very different from that, they are explicitly rejecting that idea. They are rejecting the idea that such objects and the subjects who can perceive and then conceptualize them are the starting points of reality. Instead, these radical empiricists are saying that subject and objects are the forms or patterns we derive from experience, they are just the basic conceptual categories into which we sort our experience. These are not just made up categories. They are derived from experience and are analogous to and agree with that primary empirical experience in the sense that they really are powerful and useful categories but they are still among the world of analogies, are still secondary concepts, not the "things" experienced. Pirsig and James are showing us that all so-called objects are actually just concepts but Krimel's sentence turns those concept back into an objects. That's how it converts the MOQ back into SOM.


Krimel said to Dan:
Is the problem that is doesn't match your preconception of DQ and thus must have no bearing on the subject? Or is it that I have characterized experience in an unorthodox way? Have you defined DQ  so rigidly that you are certain what is and what is not the proper way to speak of it? The MoQ seems shot through with language problems if the reading and writing of every sentence requires some specialized translation and negation of impure thoughts and words. It also seems strange that someone on a forum that espouses to be open to discussion of Pirsig's work; a place that Pirsig has invited people to join in; where Pirsig himself says in the introduction to your book, "But if dissenters didn't exist we would have to invent them because no set of philosophic ideas is worth much until it is tested by dialectical opposition." In such a place as this you feel comfortable saying that any problem will cease to exist," if we adhere to the tenets of the MOQ." It sounds like you oppose testing "by dialectical opposition."



dmb says:

This is a pretty good example of the kind of swooping savior response. The criticism is directed at your misunderstanding of the MOQ's basic terms and concepts. The first few sentences, which are questions, show quite clearly that you don't see what the problem is, that you don't understand what the objection is all about. And yet you are willing to claim that the MOQ is the one "shot through with language problems" and Dan is the one who is too rigid in his views. You haven't been able to answer for these basic mistakes but you imagine yourself a persecuted dissenter and a dialectical opposer of this thing you do not understand. From my perspective that is an absurd position, maybe even slightly delusional. Even if you weren't being criticized from several directions, each telling you that you haven't yet grasped the meaning of core concepts, how do you figure that you get to skip to the head of the class? As I see it, you're simply not qualified to be a dissenter unless and until you understand what you're supposedly rejecting. How would it be possible for anyone to oppose anything that they don't comprehend? Maybe you don't see it or believe it but that's what Dan, Arlo and I have been trying to tell you. Don't you want to know what these criticisms mean? Do they really have no effect on your sense of certainty? Dude, who is being too rigid here? I really don't that's Dan's problem here. Like me, I suppose, he's just frustrated because you're not getting it no matter what anyone says.