Platt Holden (pholden@worldnet.att.net)
Wed, 7 Jan 1998 03:49:34 +0100
Maggie wrote:
>
> I'm looking at all the various principles of Quality, and each of them
seems an accurate pointer to the Quality
> concept. Each comes from a slightly different perspective, and each
seems to be complete and concise from that
> perspective. However, I can't look at any of them and say that they
define the Quality principle. I keep wanting
> to say, "Almost, but ..." And I have noticed, that in each case, the
more each idea is modified by any of us to
> be more correct, the closer it comes to not saying anything at all.
>
Thanks Maggie for putting your finger squarely on the problem inherent in
the Quality Principle. No matter how hard we try, Quality per se is
impossible to describe. It's the nature of language to erect boundaries
between this and that. Quality, of course, is both this and that.
To quote from Pirsig, "Quality doesn't have to be defined. You understand
it without definition, ahead of definition. Quality is direct experience
independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions. Quality is
indivisible, undefinable and unknowable in the sense there is a knower and
a known, but a metaphysics can be none of these things." (Lila, Chap. 5).
Then Pirsig, having admitted that Quality can't be described, goes on to
say, "Ahh, do it anyway."
So here we find ourselves trying to do it anyway and having, as Pirsig
predicted, all sorts of problems. My approach was to attempt in the first
two principles (The Quality Principle and the Awareness Principle) to get
across the idea that the fundamental ground of reality is indescribable.
Realizing the paradox I was creating, I described Quality as
"simultaneously immanent and transcendent," "awareness without content,"
"unpatterned experience," "impossible to describe." To further transmit
this idea, I began the third principle, the Dynamic/Static Principle, by
saying, '"To explain the inexplicable..."
Diana has the thankless job of taking all the Squad's offerings and coming
up with a succinct statement everyone will more or less be happy with. She
undoubtedly knows more than anyone how hard that's going to be. She's
already in trouble by saying "Reality is everything" because she sets up a
boundary between everything and nothing. Pirsig says, "Or 'zero' or 'space'
for that matter. Today these terms have almost nothing to do with nothing.
'Zero' and 'space' are complex relationships of 'somethingness.'" In other
words, nothing is something, a logical absurdity.
If you try to solve this conundrum by saying "Reality is everything and
nothing," you fare no better because then you exclude it from being neither
everything or nothing, i.e., transcending both. And if you claim that
reality is neither everything and nothing but transcends both, that
excludes it from immanence, from being both everything and nothing.
In short, because any statement makes sense only in terms of its opposite,
then any statement can be shown to be purely relative (see Richard's letter
"How Soon Is Now?"), and if that statement is made to embrace reality, it
will turn on itself as a contradiction.
By this time you're probably thinking something like Maggie's description
of God--YHWH, or maybe "Arghh." Note that this is similar to the reaction
many people have when you try to explain the Quantum world.
If this sounds like a defense of my first two principles, it is. In writing
them I tried to make it clear that Quality cannot be described. Yet, good
old Intellect, always unhappy when it can't control the universe, will
blunder ahead anyway, blithely ignoring its own paradoxes and
contradictions until some spoil sport comes along to point them out.
How can something be known but still undefinable? That's easy. How do you
define the smell of a rose? Like love, beauty and the truth of the square
root of -1, Quality can't be described. You just know it. How? In my
principle 13, The Proof Principle, I said you know it because "it's
impossible to live without assumptions about what is Good."
Finally, and this is the point: Quality cannot be intellectually grasped in
any definite or final way whatsoever. It cannot be thought about because it
is doing the thinking; it cannot be looked at because it is doing the
looking; it cannot be known because it is doing the knowing. So, like
Maggie, I end with a poem by Lao Tzu:
Because the eye gazes but can catch no glimpse of it,
It is called elusive.
Because the ear listens but cannot hear it,
It is called rarefied.
Because the hand feels for it but cannot find it,
It is called the infinitesimal.
These three, because they cannot be further scrutinized,
Blend into one.
Its rising brings no light;
Its sinking, no darkness.
Endless the series of things without name
On the way back to where there is Nothing.
Platt
>
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