Platt Holden (pholden@worldnet.att.net)
Sat, 20 Sep 1997 18:12:11 +0100
Hugo: Your "mail to Peirce" is most interesting. As you say, there are
evident similarities to the MOQ. Peirce's "habits'" sound much like
Pirsig's "static latches." To point out that Dynamic Quality is itself a
static latch due to its duree or endurance is logically correct although
Pirsig says that DQ perceives static quality as evil and is itself "always
new."
Pirsig escapes this dilemma by claiming that DQ is pre-intellectual and
thus not subject to dualistic logic. The empirical evidence for his claim
is the mystic experience.
Those who have never had a mystic experience will tend to dismiss his claim
out of hand. But I believe nearly everyone (logical positivists included)
have had a mystic experience at one time or another, if only for a moment.
Pirsig's example in Chapter 9 where you hear a song for the first time that
"just stops you in your tracks" strikes a familiar chord. Everyone I've
talked to about this sort of experience admits to having had it. Those who
have learned how to meditate can produce the experience more or less on
demand. For the rest of us it comes, as Pirsig says, as a surprise.
Given that DQ is pre-intellectual, it's impossible to pin it down
rationally though its great fun to try. As Pirsig says, "Getting drunk and
picking up bar-ladies and writing metaphysics is part of life."
Does Peirce deal with mystic experience in his philosophy? Most
contemporary philosophers avoid the subject for fear of being excluded from
the dominant nuts-and-bolts scientific paradigm which has pretty much
bullied people like Plotinus, Schopenhauer, Emerson and other mystic
philosophers out of the intellectual playground.
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