[MD] MOQ is good. What is it good for?

[david]

John McConnell said:


The fact that you did your thesis in philosophy doesn't necessarily translate to "having skin in the game" beyond passing you thesis exam, but if you are telling me you are personally and vitally invested in these issues, I agree to believe you.  But you haven't excluded religion??? C'mon!!  The only religion you haven't excluded is Buddhism.  You have made it patently clear that you and Pirsig are anti-theistic.  The MOQ tolerates religion but does not accept it as anything more than a flawed social pattern.  You have dismissed faith in God as "garbage, low quality". (Pirsig seems somewhat more tolerant.)


dmb says:

Pirsig seems more tolerant of faith in God? Since it was Pirsig who said the MOQ is atheistic and even anti-theistic in some respects, that's hardly plausible. As a matter of fact, it was Pirsig who used the those words ("intellectual garbage" and "low quality" ) to describe "faith". And that's the KIND of religion that Pirsig rules out. I'm talking about "excluding" faith-based, social level religion precisely because it has no respect for the Dynamic Quality or for intellectual quality. In that sense, the MOQ is anti-theistic. But the MOQ is also a form of mysticism, is a non-theistic religion, a form of American Buddhism, an advocate of the perennial philosophy (which says the esoteric mystical core of the all the great religions are in agreement). But this is not to say that Buddhism is immune to these kinds of criticisms. The fact is that most Buddhists subscribe to a ritualistic, social-level type of religion too. I suspect the whole thing is much more subtle than you imagine.


Ron DiSanto teaches religion and philosophy at a Catholic University and I think he is also a Jesuit Priest. He scrutinized my thesis, as was his job on the committee, and he certainly didn't complain about my treatment of religion and its place in the MOQ. That's why I think it's so odd that you would try to use his Guidebook against me. It just doesn't add up, you know?


I was already interested in these things before I went back to grad school. In fact, when we went to meet Pirsig in Liverpool, the talk I gave was titled "Fun with Blasphemy" and, basically, I tried to show the CONTRAST between mystics (those with actual experience of the "divine") and the traditional faith-based religions, how Christianity misconstrued mysticism as some kind of blasphemy, which has been in the business of prohibiting and interfering with the possibility of having an actual experience for yourself. For many centuries this prohibition was even enforced with the threat of death. That's what's wrong with social-level, faith-based religion. It's idolatry. It's the unreflective, unexamined worship of a set of dogmas, rituals and traditions. That's why it is neither Dynamic nor even intellectual.



John M continued:

So this is one of the key issues with the MOQ for me.  Pirsig avers that the four levels of the MOQ embrace all of evolution and of human experience.  Well, it deliberately (and I think arbitrarily) excludes the most significant dimension of my human experience!  I feel like someone who sees colors, and you see shades of grey and insist that seeing color is "very low quality".  I agree that some "very low quality" patterns have been of religion and in the name of religion. What's very low quality is subversion of color vision (faith) to social institutions that screw it up, or to bad intellectual constructs that are used to judge and abuse other people.  But seeing color isn't a bad thing just because you don't!


dmb says:

I sincerely wonder what colors you think you're seeing or what colors you think I'm not seeing. What is this analogy supposed to refer to, exactly? When Pirsig was complaining about "faith" as "intellectual garbage," he was referring to "a willingness to believe falsehoods" but you are using the word to mean your "human experience" and as "color". That is just too vague to have any meaning. But I can tell you that the MOQ is profoundly empirical and experience as such is the primary reality. Dynamic Quality is experience and in the MOQ experience is reality. All static patterns are secondary, they are derived from experience and are tested in experience. Experience could be placed in higher regard. But it's also true that we can't rightly rely on either of those elements; both are necessary. One corrects the other or provides what the other lacks. They work hand in hand to complete each other, so to speak. 



John M continued:

 
When I read ZMM, I felt a kinship with Pirsig.  He felt the same sense of "dis-ease" in science that I did.  His philosophy of Quality resonated deeply with me.  His idea of an expanded rationality with values reintegrated into it inspired me to action, and I ran with it.  I wrote essays about Quality.  I worked at philosophy with a purpose, and I arrived at a form of rational thought which was called "inspirationality".  (That was given to me Dynamically.)  It became the mode of rationality I follow in thinking and working and living.  It has enhanced my life, and I have shared it with others, who have also benefitted from it.  (That's the kind of skin I have in the game.)



dmb says:

The philosophy of science is one of my great interests. For the past few weeks I've been engaged in debates about the nature of science, in fact, always making cases AGAINST physicalism, reductionism, scientism, the brain-mind identity theory, objectivity, subject-object metaphysics, scientific realism, the correspondence theory of truth, and always from an radical empiricist's perspective. I've quoted Pirsig, James, Dewey and others to make these arguments. 

But I really have no idea WHY you felt a kinship with ZAMM, what resonated with you, what mode of thinking it supposedly inspired or how it has enhanced your life. What if all of that is based on distortion of Pirsig's ideas or some serious misunderstanding of ZAMM? In that case, all those feelings that you treasure are based on a series of errors and have very little to do with Pirsig's work. In that case, you're just protecting your feelings. That's not going to carry any weight with anyone but you, and rightly so. Again, this is just too vague to mean anything. 


John M continued:


But then came the MOQ.  It's brilliant and beautiful.  But it comes up short and says, "Your experience doesn't count.  It isn't valid, and there's no place for it in the MOQ."  But I love and admire Pirsig. Everything he has written persuades me that he is a good, caring person who embraces so much that I believe in.  But the MOQ is static, as Andre says. It is an intellectual pattern, and any attempt to update it or extend it or expand it is forbidden.  So there it sits, a magnificent sculpture.  I can walk around it, explores its nuances, touch it, feel inspired by it.  But then it's time for me to get back on the road, and it doesn't come with me.


dmb says:

The MOQ  says, "Your experience doesn't count.  It isn't valid, and there's no place for it in the MOQ" ?! Where did you get that idea? Nothing could be further from the truth. The MOQ absolutely does NOT say any such thing. Quite the opposite, in fact. It's also totally NOT true that "any attempt to update it or extend it or expand it is forbidden". The problem is that this complaint is invariably used by those who don't understand the MOQ well enough to even begin any attempts to update, extend, or expand the MOQ. To be very specific, you are complaining about that to me even while you are making claims about the MOQ that are way off the mark. What good is it to update, extend or expand a bunch of misconceptions and distortions? In that case, it's just intellectual vandalism. In that case, "expansion" and "extension" are just a self-serving, self-congratulatory ways to characterize the damage being inflicted on Pirsig's work. The other John does that kind of thing quite a bit and I think it's despicable and embarrassing. 



Finally, John M said:


Please tell me, David, how you have used it.  What has it done, or what do you do with it to enhance your life?  To enhance anyone else's life?  I'm not baiting or taunting or accusing.  I really want to know.  I so desperately want the MOQ to be right and Pirsig to be right, but I've come to feel that they are holding me back in my life work.  I don't want to let them go, but I may have to.


dmb says:

Again, this is way too vague. And I'm reluctant to treat Pirsig as if he were another self-help guru or whatever. One of the central ideas is the pragmatic view of thinking, which reconstructs and even reverses the usual priorities in philosophy. That central idea is basically, as James puts it, that thought is supposed to serve life and not the other way around. Similarly, the pragmatist says that true ideas become true only to the extent that they are successful put into practice, actually used by actual people for particular purposes. That's where the rubber meets the road. That's where our concepts are verified or falsified. That's what Pirsig meant in ZAMM when he said geometry is not True so much as it is convenient. 

But to offer an answer that's probably closer to the questions you're asking, I used the MOQ every day, all day long for all kinds of things. The philosophy of science debates mentioned above was a deployment of the MOQ, for example, and the conflict between social and intellectual values is always in mind when I'm reading the news or trying to understand current events. I've learned to trust those first impressions and feelngs we all have. This reply to you is another deployment of the MOQ. The MOQ was the single most important reason I decided to go back to school, if not the only reason, and I've been trying to figure out a way to make a living at being a MOQer. If anything, I should be criticized for making it far too central to my life. But it's just so much fun that I can't resist. It's not just the MOQ but also the philosophers thinkers who clarify, support, or supplement Pirsig's work. The MOQ is the launch pad from which I explore all kinds of things, forming an increasingly larger circle of understanding. It's a fun and relatively easy way to learn philosophy. Start with what you know and work your way outward from there. As far as I can tell, Pirsig, James and Dewey are still down the road waiting for everyone else to catch up. 


As Pirsig says, he did nothing for Quality. Quality is just fine without any help from him. What benefited from his work is reason. The point is to improve our ways of thinking and that is fundamentally a philosophical project. Above all, that's what it's good for. It gives human thought back to us so that our tools work for us rather than the other way around.