From: Paul Turner (paulj.turner@ntlworld.com)
Date: Thu Aug 21 2003 - 10:58:19 BST
Hi Matt
Matt:
I don't like Pirsig's discussion of Poincare in ZMM because I think
Pirsig needlessly hitches his cart to a mule that don't pull.
Paul:
You "don't like Pirsig's discussion of Poincare"? On what basis did you
make that value judgement? Why doesn't the mule (..this special classic
beauty, the sense of harmony of the cosmos, which makes us choose the
facts most fitting to contribute to this harmony..) pull?
Matt:
I don't think we can get any mileage out of a pre-intellectual,
intuitive sense of quality. I do think, however, that we get plenty of
mileage of an undefined sense of betterness that only can be defined
satisfactorily later on.
Paul:
They both refer to an assertion of a preference, and the preference, as
it is not defined intellectually, must be made on an "attraction" to one
theory over all others, it does not seem to me to be a huge leap to see
that the attraction can be understood as a form of aesthetic. I think
the real MOQ step is accepting that the aesthetic evaluation is not
"just subjective" or capricious but primary and fundamental. Due to your
pragmatic approach, you do not seem to be willing to make that
assumption, and it is something nobody can convince you of
theoretically, it has to be accepted through experience.
But it seems to me that without accepting the primacy of both preference
and the aesthetic pre/trans/non-subjective/objective basis on which all
preferences are made then the Metaphysics of Quality can equally be
called the Metaphysics of X, where X is anything that is hard/impossible
to define.
Paul
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