[MF] A thirty-thousand page menu with no food?

[Kevin Perez]

Matt,
   
  Thanks for letting me know about you Nov 16 post on "Language, SOM, and
the MoQ."  I'll look for it.
   
  Re: Pirsig's historical mystics' take on metaphysics and the restaurant,
menu and food metaphor.  A re-read of chapters 8, 9 and 10 in Lila, the
exposition of Dynamic Quality, would appear to lead to a different
conclusion.
   
       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.
     (Lila, p. 98)
   
  I suspect it may take a different metaphor to describe how a metaphysics
can subsume both sensory and intuitive realities.  Pirsig's historical mystics' 
perspective on metaphysics may be limited to subject/object metaphysics.

  I wonder what they would say about a metaphysics that doesn't make any
particular distinction between perceived reality and sensed reality?
   
  
Kevin

		
---------------------------------
Bring words and photos together (easily) with
 PhotoMail  - it's free and works with Yahoo! Mail.